


Tidally locked

by eintausendschoen



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, I mean very slow, Movie Spoilers, Possible AU, Possible Redemption, Rey's POV, Slow Build, Slow Burn, grey force, lots of introspection, possible incest, until proven or proven wrong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-25
Updated: 2016-02-29
Packaged: 2018-05-09 08:33:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5532701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eintausendschoen/pseuds/eintausendschoen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers for Star Wars VII The Force Awakens</p><p>His eyes shone as he looked upon her. Confused. And very pure in his defeat. So much like her, abandoned, orphaned and tumbling into uncertainty. And now that their trajectories crossed, gravity pulled them mercilessly towards each other.</p><p> </p><p>"A tidally locked body will always show the same face towards the body it revolves around."</p><p>Currently on pause.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Centre of Gravity

**Author's Note:**

> Please be aware that this work of fiction contains slightly altered versions of the scenes in the movie and may drift off into a full-blown AU as the story progresses. Also, English is not my native language and this story has not been betaed, therefore please be aware of lots of odd expressions, minor/major spelling and/or grammatical errors and the likes of that.  
>   
> If you would like to beta this story or point out some mistake, please feel free to contact me. If some of the (astro)physical explanations are (more than) a bit off, please help me correct them.  
>   
> This work is purely fictional, noncommercial and for the purpose of entertainment only. The rights to the StarWars universe belong to the Disney Corporation. Copying, re-publishing and reproducing this work entirely or in parts is not allowed, however I’d appreciate it if you shared the link and spread the word. If you want it on your blog or whatever, just send a note.  
>   
> Other than that: Please enjoy and leave your toughts! Critique appreciated!
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> _“Tidal locking is the name given to the situation when an object’s orbital period matches its rotational period – meaning that it takes the object the same amount of time to orbit around its partner as it takes to rotate around its own axis. This results into the tidally locked body always showing the same face towards the body it revolves around.”_

## Centre of gravity

_“On this point a body will balance, or rotate around – or, by application of force to this very point, move in direction of force without rotation. The greatest force is applied through the centre of gravity.”_

 

Even before she fully regained consciousness she knew she wasn’t alone. Someone was there. Before she noticed pain or exhaustion or the hard metal surface she was shackled to, she noticed the stranger. At the moment her mind pieced the last available bits of information into a chronological sequence that actually made sense, her instincts kicked in. Panic bubbled up inside her like hot gas in boiling water. Fly, run away. Get the hell out of here! Energy flooded her system in a searing rush. She could barely subdue it, the urge to flee. Could barely force herself to stay calm, to refrain from fighting against the restraints. She couldn’t help the strained tremor running through her body.  
She felt his attention fully upon her.

That gave him away like nothing else.

She hadn’t felt someone focus that intently upon her for a very, very long time. What memory was left of her family probably came closest. A thought about a vanishing shuttle, the one that had carried her family away, flickered through her mind, burning like acid on exposed flesh. She felt him latch onto the fresh wound, dig for more of the fresh blood like a thirsty sand leech. Her anger flared and she opened her eyes, only to find confirmed what she had already suspected.

A black hood, a glint on the black and silver mask, his tall figure cloaked in the shadow of the sparsely lit room. It was the black-clad warrior from the vision, the one that radiated hatred and wrath with every fibre of his being, alongside a strange undercurrent of sorrow. The knight of Ren that had hunted her down in the forest of Takodana stood before her, watching her silently, his masked and cloaked form giving nothing away to the Seeing Eye.  
On another level there was much more. She felt him weigh into her, intensely focused. No-one she had ever encountered would grant her that much of their attention.

Most people focussed on anything except her, barely noticing the scrawny girl. No friends, no ties, no belonging. Being a scavenger all her life, she had learned to fashion that into a very specific skillset. She could go absolutely unnoticed if she wanted to, sensing the focus of other people’s attention like flares of light around her, and by keeping low and staying in the dark she could just pass by, a random face in the street, the dessert rat that was always there and never mattered, just like the sand and the dust, not worthy of a second glance. She could direct the focus of a merchant onto the price they were haggling about and he wouldn’t even remember her face afterwards, she could steal away from the slavers without them paying heed and escape the attention of the drunk freighter pilots littering the outposts and waterholes. It was easy with most people, a fair deal more difficult with Unkar Plutt and his henchmen, even harder with droids and nearly impossible with the detection systems of the spaceships in the settlements.

But with this man, it was entirely useless.

She felt uncomfortable in the silence between them. His presence felt heavy, uneasy. Troubled. It was an impenetrable wall of darkness, a heavy shield surrounding him, and her curiosity sparked as she wondered why by all means someone as powerful as this man would need such defences. She noticed how forced his attention felt, how obviously directed towards her and her alone, like a wilful effort. And she wondered why.

Then his voice shattered the silence of the cell. Distorted and amplified into something mechanical, processed, something unnatural and dark. The voice of a faceless killing machine.

“You are afraid, scavenger girl. Don’t be, I sense it, too.”

“Afraid?” she spat, for she was suddenly far less afraid than she was angry. “Who wouldn’t be when hunted down by a creature in a mask?”

It was a daring thing to say to a man of his reputation, yet living constantly at the verge of death had taught her little respect for courtesies and even less regard for other people’s comfort zones. She felt an aggressive flare of anger from the knight.  
Slowly reaching up, he unfastened his helmet, carefully and with a pointed deliberateness took it off, while the waves of silent, white hot fury curiously ebbed away until his mental presence felt like a wall of ice.

What the dim light revealed was a face far too young for the man she had expected to see. Far too soft. Far too open for the cold-hearted killer he was said to be. It was the face of a boy, troubled and pale, with outgrown hair and hollow cheeks and dark, shadowed eyes that could have been warm hadn’t it been for the cold stare he directed at her. And still there was something in his eyes basically screaming at her that he held something back, and the way every change of emotion played openly across his face that told so much more about him than he could ever admit with words.  
She knew she was staring at him and she didn’t care. She felt something shift inside her, slowly but inevitably click into place. Something about him was uncannily familiar, and felt right against all odds. And for a moment she wanted nothing more than pour herself into him and strip all the darkness and the pretences away and see who he really was. See the man who so carelessly gifted her with his undivided attention.

A cruel smile tugged at his lips as he noticed. The daring vanished in an instant like a candle snuffed out in the breeze and her panic was back. He stepped in on her, their bodies too close for comfort, only slightly apart. The warmth radiating from him rippled over her. Until now, she hadn’t noticed how cool it was in this cell and his body heat felt like the first real bit of warmth. Apart from fighting, she couldn’t remember having been this close to anyone. He noticed and his glance grew thick with loathing and his smirk grew darker. Then he reached for her face, but never touched her, as he savagely snapped their minds together.

It hurt like hell. Her head felt like it was ready to split in two and she could not hold back a pained cry, as he mercilessly started to sift through her memories. She could not hold back the tears that the searing headache spilled over her cheeks. And she couldn’t not keep him from noticing the humiliation she felt. That was even worse than the physical pain – and that he knew. Every bit of memory he found he took apart, plucked emotion from fact and brought the deep buried horrors back. That was the worst of it, having him brutalize what defences she had carefully crafted over years and years of solitude. He latched onto the still raw memory of the vision in Maz Kanata’s cellar and it carried him faithfully right into her mind, where she hopelessly faught to hide the map. She tried to hold onto everything, not giving way to the crushing weight of him, but he pulled her down mercilessly, razed her defences, shoved her away like she was just sand covering the water he was so desperately digging for. And there it was. Amidst the flurry of images and raw feelings of the last day, it lay like a pearl between pebbles.

The map to Skywalker. The silvery blue lines and dots BB-8 had projected midair into the lounge of the Millennium Falcon engulfed them. In her memory she stood before Han Solo while planets and stars swirled around them and the wonder she had felt back then tainted with dread as Kylo Ren took it greedily and twisted it into something it she wouldn’t recognize. He tore the image of Han Solo to shreds, more brutally than necessary, and way more forceful than she expected. He wrapped the silver lights around his hand and ripped them away from her. And as she stood there, alone in a darkness too overwhelming for her lithe form, staring at the remains of what had been her memory of Han Solo, she saw into him. In the moment of his triumph he neglected his defence and he was open to her. She did not hesitate. As she would have plunged herself at an opponent in a real fight, she threw everything she was right at him, fighting desperately for a way out.

“Get out of my head.” She screamed and pushed with all her power. To her surprise, he lost her grip on her. He backed away. His eyes betrayed his astonishment. And for a single moment there was fear. So clear and so primal on his face that she – more  by instinct than by anything else – knew it was her way out of here. She latched onto it and found herself pulled in by a gravity she hadn’t expected, like the inevitable pull of a black hole. Right into the heart of the man before him, into his deepest fear. There was a gloomy room and a mask molten into a haunting piece of ruin. Bent, broken, jagged and charred, sitting lonely atop a pedestal in a lonely room. A token of solitude in an empty world. And she found the feeling resonate within her. Like the fallen AT-AT in the desert of Jakku she had lived in. Like the imperial ships buried deep into the sand, left for decay. She knew that feeling very well. The loneliness of being singled out in a world she didn’t belong to. And the desperate effort to hold onto anything, anything at all, that would give her existence meaning. It was the hunger, the daily fight for a quarter of a ration for her. And for him it was Darth Vader’s helmet and with it Darth Vader’s power.

“You’re afraid”, she said. The tremble in her voice gave away the shock she felt at finding a kindred spirit in this creature of darkness, but she still sounded firm enough to make him flinch. “You’re so afraid that you can’t live up to Vader. That you don’t have it in you.”

She had anticipated the onslaught. It still was brutal and he ripped through her like a sandstorm would tear through the rusting hulls of the Star Destroyers on Jakku, all blind rage against an object that would not move and barely give way to its force. It was over before she knew. He stumbled backwards towards the door, his eyes haunted and his face distraught. For a moment their eyes locked again and she knew she had won the moment his glance flickered away from hers for the briefest moment. And with that he simply turned, took his helmet and stormed off. Leaving her behind, still shackled, worn out and tired beyond measure, with the sour taste of confusion on her tongue and a mind full of questions.


	2. Gravitational pull

## Gravitational pull

_“Gravity, or gravitation, is one of the fundamental forces of the universe.”_

They reached the platform just in time, with the last rays of the dying sun at their back. Just in time to see Han Solo move towards the black clad figure on the narrow bridge. His footsteps echoed in the eerie silence of the vast reactor hall. Once again she knew before she saw who waited on the bridge across the chasm. Even before her rational thinking could finish processing the scene she already knew that it was Kylo Ren. And that he was wrought up beyond anything she had encountered earlier.

The amount of conflict within him mirrored her own, as she wanted nothing more than to shout out to Han, to make him come back to safety, flee with them. Yet she stood frozen in her place, wide-eyed and knowing that there was something that needed to happen, no matter the outcome. This was inevitable under any circumstance.

She couldn’t understand the words the men on the bridge exchanged, but she understood the feelings emanating from them. She understood the meaning of Kylo Ren’s anger and she understood his longing and the irony and bitterness of finding an old wish granted in exactly the wrong moment. She did understand Han Solos fear to a certain extent, and that he did what he needed to do. She didn’t need to hear the words to know that down there was a father returning for his abandoned child after too long an absence.

Their pain was her own for a moment. And in this pain she found her connection to Kylo Ren excruciatingly open, as if he let her in on purpose. It was difficult to keep herself grounded against his massive pull. Dark and light battled ruthlessly within him, as the dying sun fought against the darkness in the room. It was a strange state of being, split apart between two bodies, two minds that started to mingle. She felt like a star ripped apart by a black hole, mass torn into funnels of plasma under the strain of a massive gravitational force, as her consciousness drifted into him, became him, passive and accepting while his mind raged in torment. She sensed her body on the platform above and felt his down here. And the borderlines blurred. They became one for a few, cruel moments.

The conflict within him became hers. There was desperation, an immense strain emerging from the sudden possibility to regain the family he had lost long ago, to receive redemption through his father. Oh, he wanted to be redeemed, to leave his current state of suspension between dark and light, belonging to neither side of the force. It was a only a wish, the wish of a child, innocent in every aspect. It was unexpected to find such purity in this man, this creature of darkness. It made up the core of his desperate wish to become what his grandfather had been. He just wanted to belong somewhere, anywhere. And power promised a place where he wouldn’t be hurt. It would be somewhere. Somewhere after all…

“I’m being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain. I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”  
The words lingered, laden with hope and bitter longing – and with an insecurity, that made them fragile beyond measure. She felt him anchor himself against the strain of a hope he sure as hell knew would be shattered a second from now. He grounded himself in the knowledge of surely being let down again. And then the answer came. Sure, determined and warm was the voice of the lost father. Quietly spoken, and casually, as if such a decision came easily, naturally. As if granting a person like him redemption was nothing special after all. And the bit of hope he had kept for himself shattered for good under the weight of the two words Solo uttered: “Yes. Anything.”

She could feel Kylo Ren’s toughts, worn apart by bitterness: ‘The promise of a smuggler. Even if the man meant it, how much worth held it after all their history? After Solo’s history? He’d talk himself out of his own funeral if he had to, and if that wouldn’t work, he would run. Like he had upon losing me. Like he always had…’

As the Dark Side took the knight of Ren, flooded him like toxin, she almost cried out. He held his lightsaber out, offered it to Solo in a gesture that could have been submissive, if expectation clouded the eyes of the observer enough to see that, instead of the hungry glint in Kylo Ren’s eyes. It was easy to mistake his troubled appearance and think him weak in this moment. It was an elaborate trap, still she wasn’t sure for whom.

When the red flare of the lightsaber’s blade emerged between Han Solo’s shoulders, she ripped herself free from him, using the shock at the death of her friend to tear the connection apart, to isolate herself in it. Disoriented she stumbled back, not aware of the tears on her cheeks or Finn at her side. Not aware that out of pure instinct she was firing her blaster at the approaching Stormtroopers. She was at the verge of collapsing. Drained and hurt and ready to run from the sheer darkness that had taken hold of him. The murder stuck to him like the heady, pungent smell of freshly drawn blood. They locked eyes again for a split second and she saw the hunger on his face, across the dark chasm and through the exhaustion of her power. He had fed off her energy like the weapon beneath them had devoured the star, relentlessly draining everything from her. And still he was not done with her.

Chewbacca’s fury roared from a spot on the railings beneath her. Instinctively she knew the Wookie would give the young Sith hell, and he wouldn’t miss. The laser bolt from Chewbacca’s bowcaster hit Kylo Ren hard. At the back of her mind she felt him take the hit and crumble, and his pain echoed through him, only fuelling the dark in him.

Finn grabbed her hand and pulled her away, dragging her behind him and dragging her mind out of its stupor. His hand felt warm and rough, and – amidst all this chaos – like a safe place. It was enough of an anchor against the rage welling up within her to break free from Kylo Ren’s relentless pull. She turned and ran with him, propelled out into a suddenly dark, cold and alien universe. Little, homeless, ripped apart star that she was. Maybe she would make a fine comet, before she burned out or crashed into a new disaster…


	3. Barycentre

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A kind thank you to all you reading and leaving kudos. It's much appreciated.

## Barycentre

_“The barycentre is the centre of mass of two or more bodies that are orbiting each other, or the point around which they both orbit.”_

She remembered a flare of red in the black-and-grey darkness of the woods. Remembered being trapped by the Sith. A massive hit by the force had sent her airborne before she could start her attack on him. Then nothing. She didn’t know how long she was unconscious, only that the force around her suddenly took a shift to the dark. Perception of pain did return to her body, and with it came a sharp awareness of the cold biting into her flesh.

Opening her eyes, she found herself still in the woods, covered in snow. The angry hiss and roar of two lightsabers in combat reached her ears. Dark and light side clashed around her, and just as she pushed herself up in a kneeling position, fighting against nausea and an excruciating pain in her back, she heard the scream. Finn!

She turned to see him struck down by the angry red blaze of Kylo Ren’s sword. As the red blade deactivated, there was only darkness left around them. The afterimage of the sword blinded her and she could not see him.

It was absolutely quiet, the sort of silence that felt claustrophobic. She was used to vast planes, to the steady rise and fall of the majestic dunes of Jakku. She knew blazing sunlight and the grey tint of the world under the stars. She could handle the corridors and tunnels of spaceships. But she was not used to such an immense darkness, and surely not to the confines the unending columns of trees presented. The labyrinthine uniformity of this frozen, dead world confused her and strangled her. The panic of disorientation clawed at her, but she couldn’t afford it now. Not with such an enemy nearby. She needed to calm down.  
As she closed her eyes she sensed him, about twenty feet away, barely aware of her. His focus was directed to Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber. He reached out to it with the force, tried to call it into his hand. She knew he would fail. He was as exhausted as she was and his wound bothered him. He would fail. He wouldn’t get his hands on that weapon.

And suddenly she realized that it was because of her that he would fail. Her hand moved on its own. Her focus shifted onto the small metal object and she extended the force through her lithe frame out into the night. The forest lit up around her in soft greys. Perception heightened to a level she had never experienced before. There it was, radiating from the distance, and Kylo Ren between her and the weapon.

She hesitated as she saw. Within him the force was battling. Dark against light. There was still so much light, contorting in a desperate plea, practically begging him to use it. And despite sensing her approach on him, he still kept his focus locked and his power divided. It went three ways now. He simultaneously tried to subdue what of the light side stirred within him with an onslaught of hatred, while the rest of his energy was forced outwards to grab the Jedi weapon. He was defenceless in this, with his attention already split up. It was a grave mistake, and something she wouldn’t have expected of him. Maybe he didn’t know how clearly she could read him. She could easily overwhelm him now: A shove with the force, a short sprint, maybe a few kicks. That would be all it took to bring him down, with that wound in his flank.

Life among scavengers had taught her early on how to effectively disable an opponent. She had never been taught a distinct fighting style, but memorized all the dirty blows when she watched the brawls in the outposts. She had learned many things while begging for food when she was still very little. She had learned on her own, imminent death being her only teacher. Death was relentless and efficient in its lessons. It came in the guise of starvation, wound fever or a few drunken bastards late at night, it wore the cloak of the nomad raiders and stung with a dusk scorpio’s tail. It had taught her she needed to be equally relentless and equally fast as death in order to stay alive. If she ran and hid, she wouldn’t be found. If she fought, it was quick and inelegant at best, but her challenger would be down before they knew.

She could do it with him, strike him down and run, leaving him here for certain death, but it was not what the force wanted. The force wanted the weapon over there. It wanted it in her hand.

She reached out.

The force answered.

And the weapon came flying past Kylo Ren with an ease that surprised her. He barely managed to stumble out of its way. She answered his baffled glance with a murderous stare of her own, anger fuelling her determination. And the blade activated, a flare of blue, tinting their surroundings in an eerie light. ‘Like lightning on Jakku’s night sky’ she thought as she lunged forward, attacking him viciously.

Again, she felt the force move. His darkness lost its edge. He was engrossed in two clashes now, the one within him, still not brought to an end, and the one with her. She sensed his weakness, it was so clear before her, and she wanted to do nothing more than to set him off with the force, unbalance him for good, inside and out. But his blows came fast, almost faster than she could parry. Even though he was wounded, he was still a trained fighter – and a lot better at it than she was. She couldn’t keep her defence and reach for the force at the same time. It was too much.

He drove her back, swing by swing in a deadly dance of red against blue, until she stumbled away from him, barely able to hold up. Exhaustion took its toll.

As the earth opened up a few feet ahead and swallowed trees and rocks and snow in a grinding, shattering roar, she knew she was cornered. Oh, she hated being pinned, the way out barely out of reach, the means of getting away measured by strength and force alone.

Force…

If she could only… reach.

He weighed her down, pinned her between sizzling sabers and the rumbling chasm and it was only a matter of time until her knees would give in. He knew. And there was the panic, crawling back into her, leaving her trembling upon the edge, at his mercy.

He didn’t push her over. She knew, he could, but he still chose not to. Instead, he chose to make amends:

“You are strong, girl, but you need a teacher.” His voice was barely audible over all the noise and the pained hum of their clashing blades. Still they struck her harder than his blade would ever be able to.  
“I could show you the ways of the force.”

She grew still in her taut stance. Right now, she couldn’t read him. He forcefully tamped down on his emotions, offering her a clean slate, his eyes intense in the flicker of the laser beams. He would wait for her answer. He willingly gave up his position of power over her to offer her a place in this world, granted her the time she needed to make up her mind. Why?

“The force…” she echoed, disbelieving and astonished, while her mind spun. But wasn’t this the answer? The force? Like a few seconds ago, the force flooded right into her. And for a split second she wondered why it wasn’t dark or light like with Kylo Ren. To her, it just was a force, and she could only give into its pull and push, like she was submitted to gravity. She couldn’t change gravity, and she couldn’t change the flow of the force. She could only follow. Why would she need a teacher to follow the way that was already laid before her?

She looked him in the eye. There was desperation now, and pain and a raw hope that was too big for him and for his dwindling power. He didn’t want to kill her - that much was clear. He didn’t want to teach her, either. He wanted something else. And in his mounting confusion she knew that he didn’t know himself what he was looking for. It was obvious that he knew how this would end, because he had been there many times before.

It was an old wound, torn open again because it was the only thing he knew to do: Beg for acceptance and ensure to be turned down. Repeat the mistake and expect a different outcome every time. Frankly, it was madness. What he did was like quenching thirst with salt water despite better knowledge. It was a mistake that would repeat itself until it killed him. She had seen others fall for faults like his, for they were vain, and death cared nothing for luxuries. In the desert, if you decided to distrust your own power, you decided to inflict a mortal wound upon yourself.

The wound he had cut into his own soul was deep and oozing, raw and torn and inflamed almost beyond hope. And still he wished to heal while he continued to rub dirt into it. The idle, comfortable madness of repeating a mistake over and over was understandable for the security it provided, yes. It was however absolutely inexcusable to her. To wilfully waste away under that kind of sickness when healing was very much an option was simply mad.

It made her furious beyond anything she had known before. This boy, this ungrateful boy had a family, had everything she was desperately wishing for all her life, everything she would have given her worthless little life for. And he had tossed it away because of a blind pride, because of a hungry need to prove himself worthy that seemed a pointless waste of energy to her. And in this instant, she opened herself to her anger, let it all in and let it pour from her. It led her blade with certitude, shattered his defiance, broke through every block and turned every stab and every thrust he attempted against him.

She drove him back, cut his arm, stabbed his shoulder, landed blow after blow. He was barely defending himself as the pain grew and he realized his defeat. He stumbled away, and his fear rippled from him almost tangible. She grappled his sword-hand the moment he seized hers and they were at a standoff. He gave his last to break free. It wasn’t enough. Her positioning was better than his, her angle on the hold granted her more leverage. Another tremor ran through the earth, a moment of re-establishing balance. That was enough for her to shift her stance, unbalance him. Her lightsaber slashed down, across his face and the pain took him out for a few seconds. Her kick caught him square in the chest and sent him on his back.

Whatever he attempted to be, right now he was far from it. Barely conscious and beaten, the boy soldier lay before her, cast into the churned up snow. Ripped from his orbit as much as she was. Where there was hatred and fury a few seconds before, she now found only pity and sadness for this creature in her heart.

If there was a killing blow to deal, it was not hers. Not this time.

His eyes shone as he looked upon her. Confused. And very pure in his defeat. So much like her, abandoned, orphaned and tumbling into uncertainty. And now that their trajectories crossed, gravity pulled them mercilessly towards each other.

Another tremor shook the earth beneath them. Before she could decide on anything, the ground opened between them and swept him away, far out of her reach. Tearing her eyes away from him only through wilful effort, she turned and left him, her heart heavy and her body numb from cold and exhaustion. There was nothing she could do for Kylo Ren, she told herself. Now, she had to find Finn, dead or alive. She had to escape with him before it was too late. Death was a sinister guide, but after all it held its promise.


	4. Intermission: Nova

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little intermission, before we head off to new shores. Hope you like it. Plus, thank you all so much for all your kindness, comments, kudos and bookmarks. 
> 
> Enjoy.

## Intermission: Nova

_“A nova is a sudden brightening of a white dwarf, caused by a cataclysmic nuclear explosion on the star.”_

She watched him sadly. The indirect, dim light was casting his face in soft shadows. He looked relaxed, and somehow this made her sad. He had been put into an artificial coma and was recovering from the operations. The surgical droids had worked on his back for almost twelve hours, before they released him into the intensive care unit of the small sickbay. There was still no prognosis if a full recovery was even possible for him, or when he would wake up.

This was her goodbye, and she didn’t know if she would return soon enough to see him wake. That too made her sad. She didn’t want to leave him behind, not after everything they had been through together. Not after he had almost given his life to defend hers from an enemy he could not hope to excel.

From the very beginning he had tried to get her out of harm’s way to his best ability, dragging her behind numerous times, her hand clutched in his. He was vulnerable beyond anything, runaway boy-soldier and homeless orphan that he was. And still he drew his power from this state of maximum exposure. The only thing greater than his openness was his courageous compassion and his determination. Watching him was like seeing a new sun ignite.

Poe Dameron had told her a few nights ago about the troops of the First Order, while both of them were sitting in front of the transpariplast window of the operation room waiting for the droids to finish their work on Finn. In a hushed voice he had elaborated the brutal conditioning every Stormtrooper had to undergo, the cruel competition amongst them. They were taken as very small children and raised in the belief that they mattered nothing, that the best they could ever hope to achieve was becoming cannon fodder in the numerous battles of the First Order. Pitted against each other in an endless drill from early age, they grew up knowing only rivals and enemies. Personal bonds degenerated into carefully measured tactical advantage against the other kids. They were denied a name, instead got a number assigned and imprinted into their skin. Instead of a normal human life, they were treated like things, conditioned to not show emotions or personality, punished brutally for deviations from the norm the First Order set for them.

She had no clue how much of Poe’s information was the shameless exaggeration of the gifted storyteller that he was. But if Finn had indeed survived this and did preserve such a splendid personality, he was indeed stronger than he appeared.

He would be able to provide for himself without her. There was still Poe, who certainly cared greatly for the young man. She knew she left him in the safest place possible. Still, there was an inherent need to make absolutely sure he was cared for, and some stray part of her wanted to be there herself and be who cared for him. Who saw him at his strongest and his weakest and loved him for what he was.

Yet she couldn’t. She had a mission that would carry her far away from here, to a destination that alone to reach would take weeks. And even if she reached that planet on the map, nothing guaranteed that Luke Skywalker was still there, or even alive. She couldn’t guess how long it would take. And it frightened her to leave Finn now, and miss everything.

Sighing she pushed those troubling thoughts away and stood. Brushing her lips softly on Finn’s forehead, she bid a silent farewell to the man that felt like a long lost brother to her. Once more she felt like the passing light of a shooting star on her way through another solar system she would only visit once in her entire lifetime. That thought saddened her most.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A word on the stormtroopers of the first order. I imagined their training to be a bit like Battle School in Orson Scott Card's 'Ender' series, if some of you know the books or the movie.


	5. Force - Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A pleasant, successful and healthy new year to all of you. May the force be with you and your goals be reached!

## Force - I

_“A force is defined as a push or pull that changes an object's state of motion or causes the object to deform.”_

‘The dark side is made up of many small errors and mistakes. Those are its foundations. Many times it wells from or latches on to a once small old wound that festered and never had a chance to really heal, being maltreated and ripped open over and over again. Pride is the plaster and the drug that holds the system together at the verge of collapse, and relentless hatred is the fuel that propels it forward beyond exhaustion. As it is the nature of wounded things, they will only find protection for themselves in wounding others. For such a being, the world will only contain enemies.’

That was what Luke Skywalker told her, when she asked him about the Dark Side. She never asked much, and he never explained much. Most of his explanations sounded like elaborate riddles to her. She found herself unable to directly understand their meanings. Often it was long afterwards, while she was distracted from actively pondering Luke’s teachings by work or exercise, when understanding came through intuition. She wasn’t someone who learned easily by listening to a teachers preach. She needed first-hand-experience to learn, and thankfully, Luke had agreed to a more practical approach.

Levitating weights and other exercise in the use of the force, rigorous combat training and a frugal life on the meagre island made up only one side of her tuition. The other half was meditation practice as well as lessons in galactic history and language, as much tactical training as Luke could give her, and teachings about the orders of Jedi and Sith and the Force itself.

She indulged herself in her training with great eagerness. Being with Luke granted a huge opportunity and she wouldn’t let go it to waste. Her life had taken a full turn to the better. On the outside, there still wasn’t much change. Meals still were scarce and she laboured hard for them, but now there was a purpose to it, a reason to endure it other than sheer, desperate survival.

Becoming a Jedi had seemed like an enticing goal to her, in her first weeks with Luke while she still had known nothing about the force and the Jedi. The magical glamour had soon worn off, though. It couldn’t be done in months or a few years of patient apprenticeship. It would take her lifetime and maybe many more to recollect all the knowledge of the Jedi that had been lost. Luke himself knew only a fraction, for he had received his training late in his life and under the pressure of war it was never completed under the guide of a master. He had learned by himself, studied the force to his best ability, but there was only so much one could accomplish on their own. The bits and pieces from R2-D2’s memory banks wouldn’t get them far either.

Now, there were only legends to learn from, and meticulous efforts to uncover the secrets of the force by hardly anything better than trial and error.

Luke shared his knowledge generously, to a degree where it came to very personal memories. He was a humble master, never dominating, never ordering. He had a way of softly suggesting and leaving the choice entirely to her. The only demand he posed on her was to decide only through the means of the force. Although his demeanour was calm and his presence nothing but kindness, he was adamant on following the ways of the force. In this he was very strict. He sensed it right away whenever she tried to take a comfortable shortcut to avoid something she disliked. He wouldn’t criticize, but instead call her attention to it and let her get into the details of her decision herself.

It was hard. And the more she learned and understood, the harder it all got. The force was a thing more fundamental than she had first anticipated. It wasn’t simply some mysterious conjuring-tricks or an odd philosophy. The more she became able to attune to it, the more she understood it as the very undercurrent of existence. It was what defined everything, life and even death. Everything _was_ through the force. From the tiniest particles to even galaxies, even universes, everything followed the laws of the force. The force was the pull of gravity that kept her feet on the ground and it was the bonds inside the atoms of her body and it was the electromagnetic fields and currents all around her. And it was so much more than her tiny mind could process. The force manifested in and throughout everything and everyone and it was always there.

She learned to follow its path passively and attentively, to put her egoistic cravings behind her and clear her thoughts, let go of destructive needs. It was a very hard thing to do, to abandon idle routine and trust the unpredictable. Often enough the whisperings of her rational mind would wage war on her to keep her from her seemingly insane quest to find the thread she truly needed to follow. Often it would be difficult to distinguish the force from the constructs of her mind and her subconscious.

But with time, she learned to listen and simply follow. And in this, she learned fast. The force guided her through her everyday life, told her when to ask a question and when to listen. When to do the dishes and when to sit and meditate. When to run and when to stand, when to jump off one of the cliffs, when to lay down for sleep. She developed a sensitivity to the finest shifts in its course, and soon she relished in being guided by its presence, trusting it to be the right thing.

It calmed and eased her, and for once she almost felt like she belonged there forever. Almost.

But every once in a while, the force did something odd. It would push her into a direction that would clearly cause pain to someone. It would have her inflict pain. And she would refrain from following there. Because it contradicted Luke’s teachings: ‘The force should not be used purposefully to cause others harm.’ or ‘If you can, prefer the peaceful solution.’ Her mind would tell her with Luke’    s gentle, hushed voice and she knew, just knew that the force was right and the lessons were wrong. And still she couldn’t bring herself to follow it.  
Was it the dark side calling to her? Or was it just her mind tricking her into something? This need to hurt and damage frightened her.

At first she tried to hide it from Luke, with growing fear that he might notice the call of the dark. That he would abandon her, send her away. But he noticed. And eventually asked her about it, calm and if anything else, then a bit curious.

She would have expected anger or disappointment from him and her own anger flared at that thought. But there was none. It was then that she realized the workings of the dark side herself.  
There had been a contradiction. Instead of faithfully following the pull of the force, she had rationalized and decided against it. And in this she found herself confused and her path blocked by a rational concept that contradicted the way before her.

The ‘should be’ took the place of what was really there, and with that the wound was cut and a seed of distrust was planted in her heart. And from this moment on she would seek to protect that tiny shameful seed of darkness from the light of day, and she would water it with lies and excuses, until her very heart festered with the rot of that seed and the world would be full of enemies. She would distrust Luke and she would force her expectations onto him. She would live in delusions and the constant need to defend herself, lashing out at others. Like she almost had, when she had expected disgust from Luke.

The realization sobered her, but the conflict stayed. Why would the force do something like that? Lead her into evil?

Luke laughed gently at her question, while the evening breeze above the cliffs tousled his shaggy white hair.

“Because, my child, the force will lead you many ways. You will find yourself disagreeing with its will a great many of times, but ultimately, it is your decision every time and the weight of this decision is on your shoulders alone. The dark side and the light are one. The force does neither judge on morality nor does it weigh up good deeds against evil. The force is what it is. It won’t persuade you nor damn you for your deeds. That is what _you_ do to yourself.”

Another riddle, but she understood this time. “So the force is a river that flows everywhere and I can decide whether I try to fight against its current or let it sweep me away?”

“Basically, yes.” Luke smiled a bit sadly. “But whatever you do, don’t blame the river for the outcome. Don’t blame the ocean for the tide. What is, is.”

Luke had a way of leaving her confused and relieved at the same time. His presence was always soothing, but never without a faint tinge of sorrow, never easy. He wouldn’t indicate where it came from, she just hoped it was related to his past, and not to her future. Almost a year had passed now since she had begun her training. She had grown to know him, appreciated him greatly despite knowing hardly anything about his life. If someone had asked her, she wouldn’t be able to tell except for what he had shown her.

If he spoke to her, it was a teaching. They spoke rarely, and when they did it was seldom personal. At first he had instructed her, told her what to do in short, raspy sentences, but the more time passed the more his instructions had subsided into mere gestures, nudges through the force, a glance here and there. Instead of speaking, he showed her images from his past through the force, the remark of a feeling always attached to them.

This was his way, giving her a few scraps and let her figure out the rest. This was her way, too. It was what she needed, what she was good at: A few scraps to polish, to connect into a greater understanding. Like spare parts of an engine. She had spent her entire childhood figuring out the purposes of the dead devices she gathered in exchange for food. Gathered information on them, imagined them coming to life, deepening her understanding of how they fit into greater mechanisms, where they were flawed and where they were perfect. She didn’t need much to work on. When he showed her, she would get the bigger picture, and he knew this.

But in all this time, they had avoided that no-mans-land behind the single-worded, many-faced question burning at the back of her mind, barely contained and very hungry: “Why?”

And now she had asked it, this beast of a question. Because the force had carried her there. Into the borderlands, the twilight band, the grey rim where dark and light neutralized. Where she was about to hurt.

Luke’s face shone in the hues of red and gold as the sun cast its last light upon the cliffs. They sat outside, face in the breeze, watching the sunset. It was the first time in her experience his focus narrowed like this. Usually, he was careful with his attention, but now it weighed on her like a fully loaded freighter would press down on loose sands. He watched her, clearly cautious, and it took him a lot of time to actually decide his answer.

His decision surprised her greatly.

Engaging with him in a full connection through the force was like dropping out of Hyperspace near a planet with defective stabilizers – the gravitational pull was insane. She damn near keeled over trying to retain her balance. It took her a few seconds to realize that he had grabbed her shoulder and only his iron-hard grip kept her from falling onto her side.

Her head spun and it was almost too much to handle.

Luke projected calm at her. He trusted her to handle this. And she did. Clarity came and she was able to meet him. This was different from the short glimpses he had shown her during training. This was personal.

‘You have experienced this before.’ He stated.  
She concurred. ‘Kylo Ren.’ was her answer. She showed him. Takodana. The interrogation. Han Solo’s death. Their fight.  
His answer was a string of emotions. Hurt. Relief. Astonishment. Anger. He subdued it. Anger again. Hurt. So much hurt.  
‘Like him.’ She thought upon his feelings, because the picture of Luke’s sunlit face blurred with that of Kylo Ren tinted in the red of his lightsaber. She found him agreeing.

‘Yes. Like Ben.’ And there bloomed sorrow. A seedling, pale white from deprivation of light, sickly and halfway withered, but still fighting, still searching to grow. A seedling of darkness that could still bloom into light, buried within Luke’s heart. She saw. He let her. She didn’t judge, she couldn’t.

She saw how guilt tried to root deeper, tried to cling to the crumbs of soil as it was about to be plucked from the ground it grew on.

‘Don’t.’ she said. And then she repeated his words as they appeared in her mind, ‘Don’t blame the ocean.’

His pain was a suffocating wave, warm and heavy, hard as it hit her but still elusive. It passed, it ebbed and swelled again. She let it be. It was not her pain. She was only grateful to share it, calm it. She kept her ground and let it pass. And stayed in the twilight.

From his mind came an image, the echo of a voice from a long time ago. ‘If you plant a seed, you should nurture it and keep it healthy. Don’t ignore it, don’t neglect it. It will wither and decay, and only mold and rot will be left. Plant it and bring it to fruition, and let it go when it is natural for the plant to die.’  
She saw tears on his face and felt the seedling sprout. It would grow healthy now as tears wash rot and mold away. It would not fester in his heart.  
Hurt was not evil. Hurt was not the dark side. It was necessary to grow. Hurt was just hurt. Inflicting pain was sometimes unavoidable and sometimes even the healthy thing to do. And still, when a wound was inflicted, it was the choice over treatment or neglect that would decide whether a person turned towards good or evil. Avoiding pain at all cost caused only more pain, it caused seedlings to wither and hearts to grow dark.

For Luke, it had been Ben’s loss. The answer to her ‘why’ was a series of memories that carried her into Luke’s past. He had blamed himself for Ben’s decision. And he had withered under his guilt.

In his memories she saw that the dark side was made up of lost balance, yet the fall into it could be averted. Balance could always be regained.

‘There is more to your question, Rey, isn’t it?’ he asked and his face showed his ruin and his strength at once. He understood her and she knew she could trust him with this.  
‘Yes.’ She said and she shared with him the searing, torturous memory of the leaving shuttle, swallowed by desert dust and blazing sunlight. The seed she had maltreated herself. ‘Why?’

She felt him think about retreating from the connection. Nevertheless, he stayed. He was insecure about this. He recognized the scene, and it bothered him. Still, he couldn’t remember. It was genuine, she felt it. It was like he ran into the same wall she always did when trying to go back further.  
‘There’s only one thing about this I know for certain.’ he projected. ‘Ben’s fall to the dark was at the same time.’

Disappointment briefly welled up inside her. She had hoped he could have told her more, told her all.  
Luke’s sad smile asked for patience. He merely squeezed her shoulder, very gentle and then retreated carefully from their connection. What he left for her was a strange feeling of peace. It was enough of a consolation.

It was still something to work on, after all. A scrap of the bigger picture. She could still get the loose part back into its place, still fix the engine that had stuttered and died. And Luke had just told her something very important: He had known about this, maybe about her, but just like her, couldn’t access his memories. They experienced the same symptom. But what had caused it?

She knew in this instant that her training here was over. In the morning, she would go. She needed to find Kylo Ren.


	6. Trajectories

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry it took me so long...! I intended to post this chapter a lot earlier!  
> This chapter was such a b*tch to write. And to rewrite, that is. The next chapter will come a bit sooner than this one. Currently doing the corrections for the next two.

## Trajectories

_“A trajectory is the flight path that a moving object follows through space as a function of time. It can be an orbit—the path of a planet, an asteroid or a comet as it travels around a central mass.”_

It felt good to be in space again. Still, she missed the open air. She missed the sound of the crashing waves and the constant chill of the wind. It wasn’t warm here, either. Shivering, she wrapped the roughspun blanket tighter around her shoulders. Cold was something she would never get used to.

It was the beginning of her second week of deep space travel and there was another ahead. Chewie had left her the falcon a few months ago with the programmed coordinates of a rendezvous point, where he had promised to check every other week to pick her up and bring her safely back to the Resistance. The First Order was hunting the Resistance down mercilessly now. What was left of the Resistance had gone into hiding. Their ships had all undergone extensive relabelling or had been ditched for rather inconspicuous models. The Falcon had been no exception. It had found refuge only briefly on Luke’s wind-swept island, before she had steered it back into space a week ago. Hopefully long enough for the First Order to lose its tracks.

Now, the ship was on auto-pilot, and there wasn’t much to do for her except a few desperately needed repairs, some cleaning and watching the com traffic. She had left Luke behind on his island. It had been his wish to remain in exile. Leaving him had proved more difficult than she had anticipated. She had never spend so much time in the continuous company of another person. She missed him. All the little sounds of his presence, his quiet, his calm routine. Hearing him snore at the other side of the hut at night and how he usually coughed in the morning. The twirls in the force around him when he moved, the rustle of his robes. She missed his soft, thoughtful gaze with the steely edge and his steady push.

It was entirely new for her to grow accustomed to someone, and now that she was on her own again, she couldn’t fathom how she had suffered through this loneliness all her life.

Luke had been absolutely adamant about not sending out a signal unless strictly necessary, because a ship like the falcon would attract way too much attention. Chewie had succeeded in installing an array of signal inhibitors and hacked some false model verification codes into the ships mainframe that would dish out false sensor data, guising the Falcon as younger and far more common Corellian YT-Freighter model. The only way to tell that this was indeed the Millennium Falcon was direct visual contact. So far there had not been a reason to disobey Luke’s bidding. She kept the com silent and the ship out of sight.

The hyperdrive was still not at full capacity, therefore she could only travel in short hops in order not to overheat it. The short-timed bursts depleted the power faster than usual. The falcon was not built for travelling extensive distances on sublight engines only. To save power, she had dialled down life support to operate barely above minimum.

When she had told Finn that this ship was garbage, it hadn’t been much of a lie. If anything, it was begging for a thorough overhaul. She did what she could with the limited tools and scrap materials she had, but it was simply too much work for her means. Even Chewbacca’s extensive repairs hadn’t even scratched the surface. He’d worked wonders on the sublight engines and the wiring, yes, but after ten years of desert sand and climate and Unkar Plutt’s kriffin imbeciles fumbling around with basically every crucial system they could get their hands on, it was barely more than scrap. She’d see to the worst of it when she reached the resistance base. If there was even time for that. That seemed to be a recurring issue with this rustbucket after all…

Probably the old pilots saying was right: It was love that kept them flying.

The programmed route avoided major systems and the busier trading corridors, keeping to passages that even smugglers and other shady characters rarely frequented. Quite often it would take a detour underneath an asteroid belt or through a nebula in order to stay out of sight, the rest was endless days in void space between the systems. The com would stay silent most of the time. She would pick up warning transmissions from automated beacons from time to time, or the radio chatter of navigational droids, of course the broadcasts of the local systems, but as she went well under the radar of any observer. There was no direct hail.

She tried to keep up her routines in exercise and meditation, but space was limited and her patience wore thin. Also, it had all been very much easier with Luke around. Not only his resourceful insight was greatly amiss here, it was his calming presence she missed most. When he was around, merging with the force seemed easier. Now, her errant thoughts would keep her from the deeper states of meditation and she would grow frustrated, pacing the narrow hallway restlessly, sometimes even kicking a bulkhead in frustration. Even sleep was difficult here, it was simply too chill and confined to sleep comfortable - or rather: sleep at all -, no matter how many blankets she gathered around herself.

She had already grown weary from jolting from her cot with the remnants of a gut-wrenching nightmare before her eyes, completely disoriented and shaken. The terrors were faceless, nameless and she would never remember anything but shadows clutching her throat, throttling her and weighing her down.

Still, she had much to think about. Endless hours passed by, seeing her curled up in the pilot’s seat, eyes closed or staring absentmindedly into the distance. Tucked safely into her blanket, while her mind travelled lightyears ahead.

So far, she had already mapped out her course onwards from the rendezvous point with Chewbacca. She would stay with the Resistance for a short period of time, to get the updates and gather intel for her hunt on Kylo Ren, maybe spend a little time with Finn. Talking to Leia was also mandatory. She might just give her some extra insight on the nature of her quest. Maybe even help her acquire a small spacecraft suited for long-distance travel that wasn’t too obviously Resistance. Then she would leave to find him.

 _Him_.

After all this time, she still found herself thinking a lot about the moments they shared. As enemies. Yet, that wasn’t quite what they had been then. In his case, she was still at loss at picking sides. He was a lot of things to her, granted, but still no enemy. When they met, he was caught in a tumbling orbit between dark and light, rotating around the unstable, rolling axis that was his own purpose. Whatever light shone upon him was reflected unevenly, in swells and bursts, soon to be dimmed again by a swallow of darkness. Like an asteroid, tumbling into empty space, catching a ray of light every now and then. He must have been sent ballistic a long time ago, by a foreign force, a shift in mass, slow decay of integrity and structure maybe.

Their trajectories had crossed and caused them not to clash, but to barely graze each other. Not enough to hurt, but sufficient to leave a mark upon each other’s skin.

She had heard about stars and planets that where snatched from their respective orbits by the gravitational pull of greater masses, torn apart entirely or merely cast into a new path around a new centre. Like him and her. Gravity would bend their orbits, interweave their trajectories with each other and sent them on a spiralling course towards a new form of balance, millennia ahead.

Whenever she thought about him, the flow of the force would become more finely etched, easier to read. Not quite like with Luke, when everything seemed to submit a subtle flow. With him it was different. All lines were drawn in his direction, as if he was slowly becoming the barycentre of her own orbit. She could not escape the gravity of the imprint he had left on her.

It had been mere minutes with a total stranger whom she knew nothing about, whom she had not cared about. Still this man had left her with an uneasy feeling that she was supposed to know him, that he had been there before and she should recognize him. But there was nothing. It was like the sandstorms of Jakku had razed those memories like they had stripped the paint on the Falcon’s hull, polished them off with relentless force until there was nothing but blurred darkness glazed over with the image of the leaving shuttle.

She wondered where he was right now. He had survived the destruction of Starkiller Base, she had felt it through the force when they fled back then. And the force told her, he was still alive.

He had to be out there, somewhere. Never before had she tried to reach for him through the force. Although Luke had taught her how to do it, there hadn’t been the chance to try out this particular skill over such a vast distance as the span of a whole galaxy.  
She hadn’t wasted too much thought on Kylo Ren while undergoing her training, there had simply been enough else to think about. But now, in this lonely spaceship in the black depths of interstellar space, it was very tempting to give it a try. Not that she had anything else to do. And she would have to find him anyway.

Still, she was cautious, despite her curiosity. The outcome was unpredictable and she would not carelessly risk to be discovered by the thugs of the First Order. She would try something safe first. Straightening in the padded seat, she closed her eyes and concentrated on her breathing until it became calm and measured, like Luke had taught her.

With the first deep inhale she pictured being seated atop the crest of a dune, the myriads of stars of Jakku’s night sky strewn around her like an up-turned bowl of glimmering metal cuttings. While she slowly exhaled, the darkness fell, washing the picture of dunes and horizon and night-sky away. Only the white hot dots of the stars enclosed her. Another deep breath drawn accumulated the dots into the familiar shape of Luke’s face. The exhale sent them outwards again, a sphere of white light, thin veil of silver on the face of the void, its threads glimmering like the webs of the Silkspinner Bug glinted on the slopes of the dunes under the morning sun. Her whole being expanded with it, moving equally fast in all directions until a faint resonance in the distance responded, sending ripples through her web.

She kept breathing in a slow and controlled manner until she could shift her focus fully onto that point of resonance. As she locked onto it, she was pulled towards it with irresistible force. Like two magnets set on a table.

When their minds touched, it felt like a warm breeze on her skin, comforting, peaceful. Luke’s mind was a smooth landscape of fine-tuned field variations, ordered and calm. A delicate height map of a calm sea under moonlight, of soft, rolling hills that stretched endlessly towards the horizon. Slight ripples of surprise moved over its surface, but stilled soon.

Their exchange was short, but affectionate. She projected reassurance and a roughly sketched depiction of her uneventful journey, he answered with gratefulness and a careful, warm admonition to be cautious with using her powers. He had said as much when she had left him and she had promised him that she would be. She assured him to keep her promise, catching the brief sight of a smile from Luke, composed and, as always, carrying the shadow of unspoken burden. Then she separated their connection again.

For a few seconds, her body felt insufferably heavy and stiff. Her back ached from sitting crouched for too long. She needed to get up and into motion. Sitting around until she collapsed would get her nowhere.

She went through her lightsaber practice with its repeating movements and flows, practising footwork and stances of all three forms that Luke had taught her, until sweat beaded on her skin. Her muscles were already trembling when she begun the stretches and bends designed to improve her agility and movement. At first she had hated that part of her training. It had taken her a long time to get into it, but as she experienced how much it helped to still her mind, she had suffered through the meticulous routine until she had begun to look forward to it. It came easy now, and after short of a year of practice, she had lost her initial clumsiness. The movements flowed in a graceful rhythm timed by her own breath and she enjoyed the tranquillity of the cadence of motion and stillness.

She washed up afterwards. The ship’s sanitary unit was small, but the luxury of hot water pouring over her body compensated richly for the limited space. Allowing herself to sit down on the worn duraplast flooring for a moment, she let his image drift before her closed eyes. There he was again, pale, eyes deeply shadowed, brows furrowed and lips drawn taut in agitation. Dark hair, dark eyes. Another seedling of darkness. She didn’t need to put any will into the transition, like she had with Luke. All she did was give into the pull of the force.

His was a much different resonance. Bold, hard, jagged, very loud. And it was a much different power of attraction, too. The energy that came from him was very rough, not nearly as even as the pull towards Luke had been. It came in bursts, tossing her around like dust in heavy gusts of wind. Nausea made her slump against the walls of the sanitary cell. She lost the grip on her body has her perception of her surroundings slipped away. She tumbled into darkness.

As their minds slammed together, she almost lost consciousness. The pain threatened to tear her apart. She couldn’t recognize anything at first, it was like static blaring from blasted speakers. There was no way to orientate, only tormenting grey noise filling her senses. Another painful impact at least cut out the contours of his mind. It was a mess. The pain was definitely his, but she felt her own body cramp at the sensation. The water scalded her skin and the sensation just added into the pool of chaos until it threatened to overflow.

She heard – no, felt – him scream at the top of his lungs as another wave of sheer agony crashed into him. Them. His body was broken. The pain was everywhere, crawled through skin and flesh and sinew down to his very bones like a thousand little bugs, multiplying on their way, chewing him up from the inside with stinging bites and turning him into ash inch by inch. His scream faded. Her vision faded.

And then it was gone. The pain was gone. He was gone. The connection severed with a brutal snap. It raked through her body, sending it trembling hopelessly like in orgasm, but much less pleasant. She found herself curled up, knees drawn tightly towards her chest, arms covering her face, her cheek flat on the duraplast floor where the water already pooled around her. It took her a minute to fight down the nausea and push herself back into a sitting position. Her shaking hand turned off the water.

Disoriented, with the taste of bile at the back of her throat, she stumbled out of the shower. The freezing air hit her painfully. Already on the way towards her cot, she dried herself hastily. Crawled numbly under the small heap of musky blankets before the cold could stick to her skin for good. The warmth spread only with reluctance, an uneasy comfort. With the fresh memory of agony still livid in her body, she could not bring herself to enjoy it. Feeling drained beyond anything, she only waited until her body stopped to tremble. Despite the questions rearing at the back of her mind she drifted only deeper into catatonia, her pulse throbbing excruciating behind her temples. Her limbs grew heavy like covered by sand. She felt her eyes closing, and with the afterimage of Kylo Ren’s pale face contorted into a screaming grimace painted onto the insides of her eyelids, she let go. She let exhaustion take her. He followed her into her dreams. For the first time, the night terrors had a face.


	7. Force - Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this is what a lot of you have been waiting for quite a while. ;-)

## Force - Part II

_“A force is any interaction that, when unopposed, will change the motion of an object.”_

Of course, she tried again. Right when she woke up. No time to waste. She needed to know. Her mind labelled it insane, risky beyond reason. Her instincts threw fear and anguish at her and the raw memory of all the pain she had just experienced. Her body grew taut in the anticipation of another onslaught. But she carried on with it either way. She wanted this. The force wanted this. It needed to happen.

It was as easy as it had been last time. She felt him even before she needed to wilfully reach out. His pull was softer this time, no ridges and edges at all, no blaring pain, only a strong, oscillating current that took her straight to him. They blended like salt and sand, flowing into each other like grains poured onto a flat surface.

Her surprise must have shown. He projected only weak amusement.

‘Finally.’ He voiced dryly. Clearly, he did not give away that he remembered her intrusion the night before. He kept a tight seal on his emotions and his whereabouts. She perceived him as a lonely dark figure, shrouded by the shadows of the dead and frozen forest they had battled in on Starkiller Base. It was what he wanted her to know. He toyed with her. He had done this before, during the interrogation. Picked a place from her memory and warped it into something that would cage her mind into the illusion of a context, so he could freely access all associations it brought forth. A stage for the play he intended to direct.

Only this time, he wouldn’t succeed. Determined not to let anything slip, she emptied her mind, and the forest scenario blurred into wavy greys.

‘Not bad’, he mockingly praised, his voice merely a whisper, and the greys shifted again. Before her eyes rose the scene of a vast hall. Not the reactor hall on Starkiller Base. A different one. With ochre sand on the ground. A power shaft of a fallen Star Destroyer. Jakku. Fear sparked inside her. He had never been there. This was her memory. How deep had he actually dug without her noticing?

‘That is right, scavenger girl’, he smiled tauntingly, with a sidelong glance at the desert rags he had pictured her in. ‘You can fight me all you want, I’ll always be a step ahead of you.’

That was his game. Giving her an illusion to waste her energy on, with her feeble attempts of dismantling it, while he stepped behind her and took whatever he wanted. He was good at this. She couldn’t expect to escape this game of his by simply parrying with her own insignificant skills in the manipulation of the mind. Deceiving an opponent with illusions was not was Luke had trained her to do, and it was not what she was good at. She was good with parts and logic, with straightforward solutions, with mechanisms and the rules they followed.

Still, illusions needed rules to work properly, too. There had to be a ruleset. As she watched him progress slowly towards her, she saw the current of the force around them for a split second. This was when she knew. There were rules they both obeyed, embedded deeply into both of them. Fundamental forces that ruled their everyday lives, rules that they both couldn’t imagine to break because they were so hardwired into their very beings. Rules that would thus transpire into the illusions he fed her, because he wasn’t even aware he was following them. She could use those rules.

This time, she did not dissolve the image. She merely took his illusion and tilted the angle with a sudden jerk, let his conception of gravity do the rest. Using her own point of location as an axis for the tilt, she shifted the hall downward in his direction, positioning herself right above him. Suddenly, the hall became a bottomless hole. The former frame of ceiling and floor turned into an anchorless, perpendicular drop. Sand filled the air with suffocating dust and they both fell.

Below her, he realized it too late. He had clearly misread the intent behind her hesitation, had clearly underestimated her. His shock unbalanced him. For a few seconds he tumbled down helplessly among an avalanche of ochre and grey, his arms flailing in desperate search for a grip or anything to hold on to. He gripped only at dust. It took him only moments to comprehend that this was his own illusion and his own game turned against him. But by the time he was able to restore the scene, she was ready, too.

She had pushed off the ground as she shifted the illusion and had angled her outstretched legs towards his chest, aiming for a dropkick. Gravity had accelerated her to a velocity she wouldn’t have achieved herself. The moment he restored his illusion and found his footing on the bed of sand, her feet crashed into his sternum with full momentum. It sent him flying backwards with such force that he blacked out for a moment. Their connection flickered upon his impact on the floor. She skittered to a halt and sand sprayed like water.

Enough time for a change of scene, she decided. The moment he came to, she had warped their surroundings into something new. The bit about him from her vision. Maybe he would betray something by what his mind offered about this sight.

It was dark. Hard rain poured down on them and soaked them to the bones in mere seconds. The ground swam with mud. It still could not wash away the stench of blood and seared flesh. Countless corpses littered the ground around them. No recognizable features, just lumps of contorted black in the shapes of human bodies. A dangerous, hungry crimson shone upon them from where his likeness stood, surrounded by his fellow knights, lightsaber sizzling angrily under every drop of rain.

It was her image, her not-even-quite-memory and therefore he was forced to look upon himself from where he lay, among the corpses, gasping for air, head dizzy, still stunned from the sheer violence of her hit. She froze the image in her mind, rain forming a curtain of shimmering red glass in the light of Kylo Ren’s weapon. The knights of Ren disappeared behind the blur of a thousand glinting droplets, became mere shadows, stains of darkness in a world of glinting light. Only one lay before her now, struck down once again. Without his helmet. Without his guard.

She approached him carefully, slowly, rainwater smearing leisurely across her skin as she progressed. This time, he was not as fortunate to have a rift in the ground separating them. How would he save himself now? Would he even try?

His eyes were fixed on her and hers on him. Their gazes cut a path through the raindrops, towards each other. For a moment there was a flicker of recognition, even surprise at being confronted with this scenery. She felt him probe for her inside in his own mind, and as he couldn’t find her there he knew it was not his memory that she used, but her own. His confusion only mounted.

Suddenly aware that she could sense his feelings, he wrapped himself in darkness. Like he had back then in the frozen forest, pounding on his wound. There was no wound in his side this time, but ripping power from him seemed to have the same effect. He couldn’t stand it. It was a wound as grave as a blaster hit, and she felt that he hated himself for falling so low.

Fear and anger rippled from him, despite his best efforts to hide it. His eyes betrayed him once again, bid her respect and swore revenge at the same time. Apart from that he was impossible to read, deeply shrouded in his smouldering hatred. He would not give away anything the way she had hoped.  
She noticed that he tried another workaround to regain power. The image started to become blurry around the edges, the black heaps of the bodies started to pool into mere translucent shadows.

‘Leave it.’ she commanded. ‘I do not wish to fight you.’  
‘Obviously’ he retorted acidly, still short of breath, but stopped his efforts. Instead, he shifted his weight onto his side. A sharp spike of pain ripped through them both as he tried to get up. Hissing through his teeth he fell back. His nausea floored her projection for good. Darkness swallowed them. He shouldn’t feel corporeal pain as he did. This was merely an image in their minds. She hadn’t really cracked his ribs. It hadn’t been real, only a projection. He shouldn’t be able to hurt like this.  
Her confusion echoed through him. He couldn’t hide his amusement. It was only his voice now, no more images and illusions. Still, he wore the darkness like he wore his mask. He, after all, was back in his comfort zone.

‘You certainly are strong, girl. But you still don’t know what you are doing.’ It was almost amazing how he could go from belittling to disbelieving to fearful and all back to patronizing in mere moments.  
‘Enlighten me’ she snapped, more unnerved by the sudden loss of control than by his taunting.  
His reply came swift and cutting: ‘Oh, should I? You denied me as a teacher once. Why should I believe you longed for my tutelage now?’ The tone was playful, but the undercurrent as treacherous as the swallowing sands, and the voice spoke of bitterness.

She didn’t like where this was heading. He played her. No illusions, only his sharp mind and his unpredictable, volatile nature. She felt at loss here, and fear came seeping into her heart. Fear of not being strong enough to resist him, fear of spilling everything she knew about Luke, about the resistance. And there she caught him flooding against her barriers, tugging at the tendrils of her frightened thoughts as if they belonged to him – and not to her. It was invasive. The revulsion at this display of utter disrespect for her most intimate feelings burned like bile in her throat. Anger flared blindingly inside her. She lashed out. Strengthening her shield with hatred and steeling her strike with white-hot fury, she ripped her thoughts from him, tried to push him away with full force. Tried to beat him down for good.

Yet this time he was prepared, intercepted her rush, and deflected her outrage. Stilled her in his iron-hard grip. They were back in the dark forest, lightsabers in their hands, his scraping the frozen ground, hers pointed upwards. Both clutching each other’s sword-hand in an unrelenting grip. Seconds before the tremor would shake their instable balance, before she would be able to strike him down. But it didn’t come. The forest remained dead and silent, and their projected bodies remained too close to each other. She could feel his breath on her neck, and his warmth through the many layers of his robes.

She felt miserable, immobilized and pinned and once again fooled by him. Her mind didn’t work, her straightforward solutions only betrayed her to his mockery and her skill was effortlessly put to waste by him. He forced her into raw violence, forced her into hatred and the desire to destroy him. Brought her to her worst and pulled her strings until she attacked. And he still caught her and blocked her attack as if it was nothing. She couldn’t break free from this like she had from so many fights before.  
The force seemed to evade her. It was difficult to understand in such close proximity to him. There was a constant push and pull in every direction, motion gone haywire. There were too many things she wanted to do, instead of the one thing she _needed_ to do. Pulling back was what she wanted to do, desperately, as well as beating him senseless and run. As well as giving into this tiny spark of human warmth, even if it was only imagined.

‘Enlighten me instead, girl’ he hissed, using her own words against her now, his voice a curious, dark slur, derision cast in molten lead, ‘how come that such a brave little Jedi like you gives into the dark side so easily? All that fear, all that passionate hatred, all that craving for a bit of warmth…’

The dark side. She stiffened. The disorientating, chaotic veil of panic, reducing her to a creature of fear, mind blurred by instinct. The veil that darkened the face of every friend to the sneer of a monster. But was a veil not really a form of protection, a hideout, a sanctuary? She couldn’t sense anything amidst the chaos of her thoughts but a soft tug, coming from well within her. Was to yearn for a gesture of intimacy really a notion of the dark side? Or wasn’t it rather only human?

The force was a twisted knot of possibilities, encircling them in a tight coil. There was no general direction to follow. It was a circle. A circle of everlasting motion. Not dark. Not light either. It took on the shades and the twilight of this place, it caressed their faces with soft hues of red and blue and every shade of ash. It calmed her with its steady flow and in this she found the strength to let it go. She had tried to grip it and find a lose end, tried to stop the motion and change its direction, willing it towards a destination it would reach on its own. She realized it now, as all her efforts had come to a standstill while the force was still moving: There was really no need to control the force. She took a slow breath, and the panic subsided. There was no need to defeat Kylo Ren. This was not a fight she could win.

‘I don’t feel a dark side, Kylo Ren.’ She said quietly, thoughtfully, while her attention was still caught in the oscillating motion of the force, lips brushing lightly against the fabric of his cloak. ‘There’s only the force and I don’t know about dark or light.’ And more to herself than to him she whispered: ‘I can’t tell what it wants me to do.’

His silence felt surprised. He wouldn’t reply. But she felt his focus shifting. He wondered – not just thought about or analysed or pondered –, he _wondered_ about her words and he wondered about her, and in this she found an innocence that was befit of a young child, and not of a grown man who prided himself on violence and cruelty. His presence was closer now, closer than ever before. With it came a yearning for kindness, wrapped in layers and layers of denial and bitter disappointment. It hit her harder than any blow he could have dealt.  
And suddenly there was the way. It was a mad thing to do, but she found herself not caring much for reason any more. She retracted her lightsaber blade and slowly loosened her press against him, giving into his push inch by inch. He could have finished her know, pushed her down, disarmed her. However, he didn’t act on his advantage. In fact, he carefully balanced himself against her, slowly releasing the tension from his muscles, attentively following her example. They did not move. He did not move. The silent wonder still radiated from him, achingly, sadly.

Waiting, he stood, lightsaber still ignited, but his grip on her sword hand was growing lighter. They stood like this in the image of their minds, very close, her hand embracing his wrist ever so lightly, and his hers. She could feel his sword-hand tremble, and she could hear his heartbeat, her face only inches away from his chest.  
For a while, it was only this: His too hard, too sharp heartbeat and her slowing breath and the silence of the frozen forest in their minds. His confusion brushed against her, soft and yet deeply sad, like the sigh of a still warm midnight breeze. Within him, curiosity clashed hard with animosity. In the red flare of his blade, his eyes spoke volumes about his conflict. She knew this struggle very well. He was weighing the call of the force against the credo he had been taught, against all his plans and the warped reasoning of his mind. All he had longed for was right before him, and he knew the force told no lies: Someone to take him in and accept him as he was, hero or failure, dark or light. And his longing nearly split him apart.

Closing her eyes, she remained in his presence, only let go of the picture he had tied her in. It didn’t matter. It was only a richly decorated frame. What mattered was their fragile balance. And right into the midst of it the force needed to go. It needed to shatter what was welded poorly, it needed to break through set walls of defiance and create a new path. It needed to hurt in order to heal. She felt that he had sensed it too. She felt it in the way his defences came back up, in the way he desperately tried to retreat into darkness.

‘You said you wanted to teach me the ways of the force’ she projected, and his whole presence seemed to freeze. They both knew what she was about to do, and her courage almost dwindled as she felt his fear of the unavoidable.

It took all her trust in the force, all her strength to carry on. And it didn’t feel like merely a few words, when she spoke, rather like the crushing, shattering weight of an asteroid against a fragile glass pane that separated a tiny bubble of oxygen from the void of space. But like the asteroid, the words could not be stopped:

‘I denied you because I feel that you don’t have the courage to follow the force yourself.’

It was merely an observation, projected calmly and without judgement. It was only truth, offered kindly, but it set him off like water cast into burning oil.

Suddenly, ripped open violently from the inside, his mind lay before her like a map. The route of his life clearly lined out by the flares of emotion that connected the dots. His anger at her words burned blindingly, it tried to punish and it tried to sear, but it could not hurt her. It could not keep his subconscious mind from calling up the memories of all the times he had been too afraid to follow the call of the force. It couldn’t keep his curiosity from latching onto this strange power she wielded. It couldn’t keep his traitorous heart to long for her acceptance despite the darkness he tried to hide himself in.

The memories flickered past her almost too fast to process. There was much pain, strung upon the course of time like tarnished pearls, different shades and nuances of it, but still a lot of pain. Received and dished out generous in equal measures, self-inflicted or received at the hands of others, it mattered not. Every single one of those memories had left a deep wound, some had already scarred over, and others were still raw. And amidst the charred landscape of his past it was. The seedling that could heal all the wounds it grew on. She saw it only briefly. It was fleeting, and soon gone. Yet, she had perceived it. The glimpse of a memory.

_A tiny hand tucked in a bigger one. The feet of a small child and the black boots of an older boy, running alongside each other on roughly hewn stone. The boarding ramp of a shuttle that was all too familiar. Helpless, panicked tears in a set of forest-coloured eyes, too large and too afraid for what their young owner had to endure. The memory of a brief hug, brown curls sticking to his cheek for an eternity enclosed in a heartbeat, before everything vanished, swallowed by the drone of a large engine._

There was never a face. But there was the distinct feeling of rightness that came with following the force. It was his memory, but it felt too familiar. It felt like…

Cold.

He was gone. The connection was cut and she found herself on her cot, shivering suddenly. He had retreated so violently, so abruptly that she wondered why. Had she hit too close to home?

She didn’t try to reach out again. After all, it hadn’t been wholly unsuccessful. This last bit of memory was more than she could have hoped for. She pondered it and felt something stir behind the glass wall inside herself. Something was behind it. And she had come closer. Closer to breaking it down.


	8. Orbit

## Orbit

_“Orbit means course or track and it describes the gravitationally curved path of one object around a point or another body.”_

 

He surely was a lot of work, she thought grimly, bent over a bucket full of encrusted evaporators submerged in silicate-corrosive, with her hands in protective gloves and her face covered in a filter mask, holding a rag and a carbonite brush. She had pulled the parts out of the Falcon’s hyperdrive, more accurately the tertiary cooling unit, right after it had cooled down enough to access the parts. The primary unit was still just below melting point and the burns she had received taking the evaporators out still hurt too kriffin’ much to get her temper down. At least she hadn’t to trouble life support for heat now. The whole ship was hot as Jakku at noon, with two red-hot aggregates at the back.

Actually, this disaster had been bound to happen. She should have known it. Right from the moment when she had punched the controls to escape the Tie fighters on Jakku. She should have seen it coming from the second Han Solo sent the drive screaming when he ripped the Falcon out of hyperspace inside the atmosphere of Starkiller Base. And she damn sure should have listed to her guts right before she fired the drive past its breaking point to escape this blasted ion storm.

_Should. Have._

Should have known because this was what she had spent every day of her miserable life with: Cleaning metal machine parts from sand and quartz dust, so that applied friction would not grind them down and more importantly, heat wouldn’t melt the dust and coat the parts with fused silica.

Should have waited for the kriffin’ storm to pass, even if she lost a few days. If it hadn’t been for _him_ , she would have waited. Now, she wasn’t sure if she would make it to the rendezvous-point in weeks, or ever – given that the primary unit was blasted to oblivion and the second might not have survived the brutal drop-out.  
With only two barely functioning cooling units left, the drive could only function for minutes now, and that multiplied the few days of travel left into nearly six weeks of excruciatingly slow progress through interstellar space. Six weeks that she couldn’t hope to survive. She had energy and therefore oxygen left for two weeks and food for twenty days. If she limited all resources to absolute minimum and hungered through the last week she could stay alive for four weeks. Not enough.

At least she knew the problem with the hyperdrive now, she thought acidly as she violently hammered the glass coating off the evaporators. She knew the problem with quartz dust and heat as every mechanic did that had ever flown into a desert environment. The silica coating would trap the heat within the metal and destroy any drive thoroughly, breaking up synthesized alloys and deforming important parts. And with all that damn force mumbo-jumbo she had ignored her better knowledge for the sake of kriffin’ Kylo Ren and his dark-side bullshit.

He had plagued her for five days now with shoving whisperings and images and all those disturbing what-nots through their connection and vanishing immediately before she even had a chance to respond. Whenever she had reached out to him, she had felt his resonance disappear. Or worse, he would multiply the resonance and warp it into thousands of false signals. He was evading her to play a little game of torture of his own.

She had slept a total of nine hours for the five days since their encounter. He simply wouldn’t let her get any rest. He found her easiest when she was dreaming, it seemed. Her dreams had been full of him. Full of her, strapped onto the rack on Starkiller Base. Full of her being hunted down in dusky forests. Full of her being tossed into endless darkness. And always, always there was a black-and-silver mask and hardened silence filled with sheer hatred. When she was awake, he sent her scraps of memories or illusions or anything else to unsettle her.

Han run through with a red blade. Finn cut down among ice-crusted roots and upturned snow, his eyes widened in death with disbelief and horror. Poe’s X-Wing shattered by blaster shots amidst a field of wreckage. Leia crushed in a vicious force-choke while her base was stormed by soldiers in white duraplast armour.

It went on and on. Each vision made her stomach roil with panic and the immediate need to punch the drive and fly to their rescue. She would have done exactly that, had not her damned mind reasoned her back into following the programmed rendezvous coordinates. She had tried to stay calm despite all his efforts. She had ignored the forceful urge, faithfully battling down her anguish.

She had barely managed for four and a half days.

On the fifth day, when she had been almost positive that she could resist his despicable transgressions, the com had chirped up with the ion-storm warning. The ripple in the force followed shortly after, the sure path before her lost contours and dissolved into a frenzied pattern of possibilities, a storm of its own.  
It was swept away by him with another vision, drowned out by impending darkness, carrying the image of Chewbacca with it. Chewbacca dragged from a burning wreck in heavy restraints, then shackled to a torture rack. Droids bearing into him, his screams echoing through a labyrinth of durasteel corridors.

This wasn’t a ruse or a repeated memory like most of the other visions had been. This one was newly formed and still raw and hot in its intensity. This was the real Chewbacca, suffering real pain. And the force writhed in his pain as Kylo Ren poured it into her through the bridge between their minds.

This was the sole reason she had burned out half of the Falcon’s drive.

The sudden surge of fear for Chewbacca’s life had not been her own. He had pushed it onto her, soaked her with it and kicked every bit of resilience in her down with a sudden, desperate rush of anxiety. And instead of her mind, her instincts had kicked in, adrenaline firing her into a madness she couldn’t process.

It had been him, and she was absolutely sure he had just dumped on her what he could not suffer on his own. And now it was hers. Her fear. Her desperation. Her body shaking with strain.

She cursed under her breath and desperately continued scrubbing the glass splinters off the metal. She had to try and get the damn drive to work again. She had to get going again.

She had to. For Han. For Chewie. For everyone.

She _had to_.

The tears in her eyes burned even hotter than the scorch marks on her skin, and way viler than the acidic stench of the corrosive. The roots of desperation were already sinking into her heart like red-hot wire and it made her angrier than she could handle right now. Her hands shook, but she kept working, even though the tremors of helpless fury raked through her body like earthquakes, spilling tears like hot magma wherever they ripped a trench. She knew it was futile to keep trying to fix the damn ship, she knew the damage was too great.

But right now, the movement of the coarse carbonite brush against the crumbling layer of glass was everything that stood between her and a dark, mad place she could not afford to go. It was never far away, this land of shadow, where she hid all the seedlings of darkness she had sowed into the wound that was her heart.

 _She could not go there_. Not _now_.

She kept working, focused almost violently, stubbornly on the metal rod in her left hand, poured all her anger into the movement and forced herself to do this. It was so hard that it hurt. She clenched her teeth and tore her thoughts from him and the hatred she wanted to force onto him. Forced herself to concentrate single-mindedly on the task at hand, to not think of anything but the next scrap of glass to remove.

It was what had carried her into the hearts of the fallen ships time after time, through sleepless nights when hunger was almost too painful to bear. It was what had made her get up and survive day after day under the blazing sun. What had made her crawl back to the outpost through the sand for miles when she had been beaten down and robbed once again, no matter how much her wounds hurt. It was what had made her fight fever and sickness in her lonely bolthole.

It was what she had learned to do.

To _survive_.

After all the progress she had thought she had made towards a better life, she was right back to where she had started. It was survival.

Her and death again. Only this time, death was the size of the universe.

No matter how much she learned, how much she grew, she would only find herself on this battleground again, pitted against a foe that had grown in equal ratio, an enemy that would always be a bit stronger than her. Despair was the blade that death wielded, and she could barely parry its blows with her stubborn will to live.

Her hands stilled as the thought grew roots. She could not win this. She could only hope for a truce for a little while, until the next clash, until she would lose the last fight.

This was a bitter remedy, but a remedy nonetheless: As she _could not_ win this, she did not _need_ to win. It was only a waste of energy. She only needed to parry, to stop the fighting and find another way, because this was not the last time she would stand against death. She knew this with every fibre of her being, as she had known it every time in her past encounters with death. There was another way. She needed to trust this.

She needed to _trust_.

The evaporator hit the floor with a clanking sound that she didn’t notice, as the realisation hit her hard: This had always been the way out, the path that carried her faithfully. This had always been what had kept her alive. She trusted _herself_ to find the way.

Relief flooded her like cool water, filling up all the burning gorges of anger with a soothing calm, and the frenzy of the force around her subsided into a single elegant vector, into a course that had been mapped out from the moment she had embarked on this journey.

Everything she had done, on from the moment she had broken the atmosphere of Ach-To, had been just a detour, an effort of straying from the path. No wonder she hadn’t been able to connect to the force like when she was with Luke. She had been barely following its will.

The force had asked her to find Kylo Ren. Not to return to the Resistance, not to sneak around the galaxy in a barely functioning ship. It had been a clearly set goal and she had tip-toed around it. It had been the futile attempt to stray from her orbit.

If she needed to find Kylo Ren, there was only one way to go.

Once again, it felt like madness as she walked into the cockpit and fired out the distress-signal on all frequencies, nearly overloading the transponders while boosting it with the remaining energy.

Once again it felt like doing the right thing as she gave into the pull towards him, as she broke through the barriers around his mind and poured herself into the storm-torn sea that was the landscape of his thoughts.

She dove deep, underneath fang-teethed shallows and into forests of seaweed, turmoil and swallowing darkness, down to the crushing depths where his pain seethed like abyssal volcanoes. There she ripped him from the layers of torment he had locked himself in. It felt so easy, so easy and sharply cutting as breaking sea shells between her hands on the rocky shores of Ach-To. She shook him and broke him free and his dark eyes ripped at her heart like a ship lost in the storm would tear on its anchor-chain. And down there, underneath the crushing weight of an entire ocean, but once again free, she left him. Left him a single message alongside the image of her coordinates.

‘If you still want me, you better come soon.’

As the connection was severed, she caught a glimpse of him, the real him, haggard and pale, clearly hurt, tumbling from a sickbed, a tangle of bloodied white sheets and torn black clothes and IV-lines ripping from flesh. With this she knew he would once again rip open his wounds and force himself out into the cold night to hunt her down. He would come.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued.


	9. Equilibrium – Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry to keep you waiting, sweeties. <3 Work fully kicked back in after the holidays and I'm trying to maintain a weekly update. En plus, those two really are a bunch of stubborn crackheads doing whatever they want. They appear to be caring nothing for plot and plan and I'm this short of throwing a bit of Hux into the mess to get them back on track and whiplash some discipline on their asses.  
> (Also SBNS for all the technobabble. I just love StarWars mechanics is all.)

## Equilibrium – Part I

_“The condition of a system in which all competing influences are balanced.”_

He was on his way. She could sense him closing in at the back of her mind. His presence had appeared a few hours ago, and since then become rather hard to ignore.

The pain that she had experienced the first time she had linked with him was back. Although it had subsided since then, it was still very present. It seemed to balance right on the point where it was just not enough to consume her attention, but could not be ignored either. She couldn’t quite track it to its source, and she couldn’t block it out either. The only bit she could determine was its relation to Ren’s inner conflict, as he clung to it insistently. As if his life depended on his ability to feel this pain. It was a strange thing to cling on to.

As their link seemed to deepen with the shrinking distance between them, her perception of him grew clearer. Like the pull of gravity that increased with a shorter radius. For some moments it grew intensive enough to catch a glimpse of his surroundings. The dimly lit, angular cockpit of an Upsilon class command shuttle, hyperdrive controls punched to maximum, a lot of traffic going on in the HUD. The cockpit empty except for him, slumped in the pilots chair, and only the strange manner in which his hands clenched around the armrests betrayed that he was in pain.

It was a curious feeling, being this close to him and still so far away. Being within his mind almost as deep as she had wedged herself between the hyperdrive and the large coils of the tachyon compulsory unit to put her evaporators back in. Two places at the same time. He made no effort to shut her out. She wondered if he did notice her at all, wrapped up in his pain. Was this his way to anchor himself against the pull of their connection, just like she kept her hands busy with repairs?

In comparison, it was a bit mad. Indulging himself in his pain and shutting everything else out was a selfish action, whereas she found a grounding in making something whole again, makings things better that were not herself, outside of her own radius of misery. After all, in their contradiction, both sides found a certain equilibrium.

Her smile was bitter at the thought. Balancing themselves against each other, yet again. Forming a new orbit. Still it was uneven, their paths not fixed yet. But they would try to gain equilibrium whenever the met. They had when they had met in their minds. And upon the edge of the trench on Starkiller Base. It was a fragile balance, as it seemed to be the rule with them. She wondered if there would ever be anything but this, if there would ever be lasting stability. For now, it was enough that they kept the balance as long as they could. He had not send her anything but involuntary fragments of his perception. And she was grateful for the short-lived truce.

She kept working, returning unit after unit to their rightful places underneath the drive’s capacitor. She didn’t see her hands from where she lay, so she had to carefully feel her way around the nooks and ridges and edges of laser-cut metal. It was a constant change of textures, sharp, rough, oily, smooth, dented, dusty; sandy where the quartz dust had sunken down. It felt pleasant against her hands, this familiar world of metal and duraplast, of grime and wire and complexity. She felt the currents and the magnetic hum of the charged parts and conducts, the almost unnoticeable vibrations of the alloys around her.

It was enticing, letting her mind melt in to the organism of the drive’s machinery. Letting the machine speak its silent language of currents and electromagnetic fields, she would listen and align the misplaced part or pick the good find among ruined pieces. She would feel where a defect needed to be mended and she would reach there with a sure hand in utter darkness.

It was a force on its own, to be found at a deeper level of understanding, very subtle sometimes and other times blatantly pouring itself over her. It was a language that spoke throughout anything and everything, and often, when she had dared to listen, just listen, she would find it a choir of a thousand voices speaking as one.

This ability to listen to this and find what she needed was often what had earned her daily bread. And after all, it was the trench that alienated her from other people. Because they wouldn’t listen, they would just dig and rummage and fuss around, drowning those voices with their clangour, not taking notice. Would go hungry, while she returned with her net full of finds. Or, if they were fast enough, or strong or mean enough, return with her net full of findings, while she dragged herself bleeding through the sands.

Yes, it was this that had made her lonely, made her an outcast, made her hard. But within this world of hard edges and angular dips and swells, of steel and oil and rubber, this world of darkness and blinding light, cold and heat, pull and pressure and friction and tension, she had always had a home. Her fingers caressed the studs and bolts above her, quite lovingly, as if it wasn’t metal she was touching, but skin. She smiled, mind mingling with machinery, sinking into tranquillity, into peace.

A shudder ran through her that wasn’t her own. Stirred her out of her trance. It was him, retreating quickly, as if he had touched something too hot and burnt himself. He finally shut her out. The sudden silence left her shivering. The steady sinus of his pain had gone with him, and in this she found a bit of relief. Her smile diminished in the weight of the now empty place at the back of her mind. Without him, her head felt achingly too large for her thoughts.

She filled it up with busy thoughts, blueprints of compartments and parts and the right way to drive in a screw, while her hands filled the suddenly heavy silence with the softly ringing noises of metal clanking against metal. Enjoy it while it lasts, she told herself, securing the last bolts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HUD = Head Up Display, in this case I imagined a semi-holographic interface for communicational traffic projected right into the pilot's immediate field of view, so they can check their mail while... yeah, anyway - I'd love one of those for my car.


	10. Tidal force

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, here we are, finally. Get ready for some real-life interaction.

## Tidal force

_“A tidal force is a difference in the strength of gravity between two points, strongly dependent on distance. A mild increase in distance between two objects can make a large difference in the strength of the tidal force.”_

 

When she dragged herself out from under the bulkheads almost an hour later, she found the com buzzing. As expected. The sublight channels suddenly burst with bustling activity. As it seemed, her emergency-signal had called up a swarm of bounty-hunters amongst other shady creatures, scavengers probably, and a few honest souls that came to help. Through all the buzz cut the sharp, protocol-straight hail of a First Order Rescue Barge, with the aptly phrased promise of destruction and death to anyone who would even attempt to draw near the stranded Falcon, in form of a Tie fighter squadron in tow.

The crowning piece to this rather amusing accumulation of hails, transmissions, threats, claims and warning signals was the subtle message in machine code that was projected straight into the Falcon’s CPU. The hack originated from a the First Order command shuttle, way ahead of the rest of its party, turning her neatly organized data panel into a mess of blurry lines of rampant code, while she heard the systems shut down around her. The ship went dark.

It was not uncommon practice, as she had learned from the smugglers and pirate captains on Jakku. Blacking out a ship via electromagnetic pulses or simple mainframe overloads was a method often used when abducting a ship for illegal salvage trades. The target would vanish from all tracking sensors and detection devices, indistinguishable from any other cold rock in space. That made it easier to plunder or ‘relocate’ it unnoticed by officials. The older the model, the easier it got. It took however a sophisticated knowledge of the ships and its processing unit and according to the shady folk in the waterholes there weren’t many out there who had quite mastered ‘the art’.

Sometimes - and mostly among the less sophisticated bounty hunters - it was a tactic used to quite literally eliminate the competition, sending them on a helpless drift into a cold and lonely demise by suffocation.

The last line of code repeated itself until the whole screen was filled up with small pixelated characters, turning into a meaningless mosaic what had been an intelligible message:

_Don’t even try to escape me again._

That was him. Unmistakeably. If it hadn’t been the message, it certainly was the melodrama. She just wondered why he had blacked her out. Given his origins, it was not much of a surprise that he knew those dirty tricks and played them well. With that entourage of his trailing his wake through hyperspace, it was not a strictly necessary thing to do. Either he tried to cloak her from the other interested parties, or it was just scare tactics.

She gritted her teeth. Either way, it affected her more than she wanted to admit.

“I won’t”, she answered him, whispering to the darkness as the lights on her panels went out, her eyes fixing on the lonely buzzing diode of her long-range proximity sensor that sat on the edge of the control panel like a lost Lumibug. The last light to stay alive. “I didn’t call you out to run away again.”

As she watched him approach through the increasingly frantic blinking of the single red light, the ship grew colder. It was a bit much to call a ship sentient, but after a while, machines tended to develop a way of behaviour that resembled personality. She suspected it was a remnant of a way of usage imprinted into hardware over time. Most drives that had been used by a certain pilot for a while tended to adapt easier to this person’s specific style of use. Maybe some kind of electromagnetic memory embedded deeply in the particle structure. Maybe friction and repeated heating and cooling in a certain way shaped the parts. Maybe something else entirely. She wouldn’t know.

She wouldn’t know if it was only the cold that made the Falcon sigh and moan and croak in the darkness, or if it was the finality of this moment. After all, it was a ship that was not used to simple capitulation.

It was used to Han fighting or talking or cheating his way out of whatever trouble was cast at them. It was used to victorious triumph after relentless, seemingly unwinnable battle. It was used to a hot-headed pilot that was blessed by the luck of the single last moment, if the legends she had heard even came close to the truth.

It was, however, not used to patience. And not to be send adrift amidst the stars with its pilot refusing to bring failing systems back online.

A shiver ran over her, yet her body refused to turn and seek shelter from the cold. She, too, wasn’t used to capitulation. Her line of sight stayed rooted onto the fast increasing pulse of red on the console. Her feet grew heavy on their spot and gravity seemed to multiply its measure upon her shoulders. If time was a value of significance in the stretch of darkness and interrupting tidal waves of red light, it certainly was drowned out in her perception.

Cold crept up on her, keeping to the shadows and from there touching mockingly light where her skin was exposed. The heat from the aggregates had almost vanished and without life-support or the air circulation systems running, it would dissipate even faster. The sweat on her skin had dried, and the grime from the engines had rubbed in. She felt dirty and in dire need of a shower. Her burns hurt even more in the chill air. She forced her thoughts away from them. Away from the fear building in the centre of her chest. She needed to be calm.

It would not be long now.

The diode stopped blinking synchronously with him emerging from hyperspace. With a sudden flash of light the First Order command shuttle appeared black and ominous in the star-strewn distance beyond the Falcon’s cockpit windows. Large like a vulture and as cumbrous in its approach. Like the bird, it carried dread under its oversized wings.

She stood still, watched it draw near, with her mind empty and her hands growing numb. The large ship drew up alongside the Falcon, a mere patch of darkness cut out between the stars. As his cockpit passed by, she saw him briefly, cast in dim red light, hands busy on the thruster controls. Beneath his mask, he seemed to stare her down. He still kept the block in place, covering his point of resonance, shrouding himself. She still sensed his presence, dark and heady, spiking with the promise of fire with the smell of smoke already in the air. She lost sight of him as the massive ship came to a halt on her starboard side, moving into position for docking.

The docking procedure went effortlessly smooth. She watched on the display as foreign code was deployed into the Falcon’s operating system, releasing the hatch, powering the airlock, engaging clamps and mag-pads. He knew what he was doing.

The violent hiss of air in pressure exchange startled her as the hatch opened. Slowly, she turned, facing the corridor towards the boarding ramp, her hand still on the back rest of the pilot’s seat for a support she had not known she needed until now. No emergency lighting, no power. Contours only barely visible in the scant light the stars provided, here, so far out between systems. She could only make out a small part of the hall, the rest was blocked out by the cockpit’s bulkhead. That did nothing to calm her down.

He was quiet, heavy boots treading lightly, silently. His approach was slow, and it only stoked the sudden flare of panic in her throat. His darkness was even heavier than the shadows in the corridor, pulling at her core as vicious as a Black Hole, ripping control from her with inevitable, thoughtless ease. She only heard his footfall and the rustle of his cloak. Standing rooted in the middle of the cockpit, her perception heightened to painstaking detail, focussing on the strangely familiar threat that was him. Until the very last moment, she couldn’t see him.

Her breath hitched as he rounded the corner, and her heart thrashed against her ribcage. A wild thing, caged; as she was, with him blocking her way out.

He hadn’t changed much, torn cloak, steely glint on his mask, arms wrapped in leather armour, flowing robes and a broad set of shoulders drawn back, masked head lowered menacingly beneath his hood. Yet there was an air of uneasiness about him, as he only reluctantly stepped through the narrow passageway into to the cockpit. She could not quite nail it down and he blocked her thoroughly from reading his mind, but in the cautious way he entered she sense that he was on dangerous ground here.

Coming to stand right next to the bulkhead, he blocked the entrance with his body. Even though she knew him hurt, she didn’t doubt for a moment that she did not stand a change fighting past him. She remembered quite well how he had driven her back, the swings of his lightsaber heavy with momentum. He was way stronger than he let on, even wounded. Without a moment of surprise, she could not hope to win.

The way he stood, looming over her, made her uncomfortable. He was too close for this small room, too damn near for the silence that tried to wedge itself in between them. Just within her personal space. Just within reach of her arm.

Being this close to him intimidated her, yet not enough to make her miss a detail that could be turned into a way out of this. He caged her and hit her weak spot. Again. She could not afford to let him turn it against her. It was a fine, barely visible line through the darkness, but she could play him where he was weakest. He tended to blind repetition, in mistakes as well as in his winning strategies. She could use this.

“No taste for a fight this time, scavenger?” he snarled, cutting through her thoughts. Mocking. The strain in his voice blunted its cutting edge.

“No”, she said, with forced calm. “We need to talk.” It didn’t come out as fierce as she had hoped.  
He merely angled his head in derision. “Do _we_? Or is it rather _you_?” He let it sink in, but cut her off as soon as she attempted to retort.

“You will come with me”, he demanded, distorted voice emotionless and hard, despite the rising agitation he tried to hide.

Again, she denied. And felt his temper flare at her refusal: “Not until certain conditions are met.”

She had never demanded anything from anyone without a just cause – or a weapon pointed at some vital part. And she was not used to bargaining and negotiations. The words were foreign on her tongue, flung forward by adrenalin and a foolish attempt at regaining ground against him. She felt him sense it, the acidic burn of his anger eating away his already thin patience. It was obvious by his clenching fists that he fought the urge to drag her out behind him, but curiosity seemed to get the better of him.

“You are asking conditions?” he ground out, incredulous, his irritation palpable in his strained emphasis. “Do not test my patience, girl.”

She glared at him, but stubbornly refused to act on his implied threat. “I am asking for repairs. This ship is in bad shape. Mainly the drive, but sublight, circuitry and heat distribution, too. If I am to accompany you, I want this ship repaired on your expense, and I want you to ensure my safety.”

His sneer, although not visible, translated through his voice. A flat-angled knife, but still cutting. “Oh, you are certainly not in a position to demand _anything_.”  
“Depends.” She replied instantly, coldly, not giving his remark any room to enfold any threat.  
What rumbled out of his masked was an unnerved bark: “Depends on what, girl?” His fists opened and clenched again at his side where he believed them to be hidden in shadow, hidden from her perception. She knew anyway, and his rising anger gave her leverage.

“On what you assume I am.”

There it was. A spark of doubt in the single-minded certainty of his annoyance, his self-righteous arrogance. She had had plenty of time to think on his mind games, and this was the perfect opportunity to test what she had learned. Now, she had driven him into defiance. And it was perfect to close his own trap around him. This single spark of doubt could kindle uncontrollable wildfire.

She was willing to give it a try.

“Then _enlighten_ me.” He stressed the word. The force rumbled with the resonance of his building anger.

“When in our past encounters have I given you cause to assume I am easy bait?”  
A menacing tilt of his head towards her was his sole reply, but quite sufficient to assure her in her course: “Let’s see where we are truly at, Kylo Ren.”

There was a quiver in his voice and a tremor in his leather-clad arms. It made his angry impression waver – and still he appeared more menacing. “ _You_ are _truly_ at my mercy here”, he grated, clearly counting on his appearance and her memory of him in combat.

“Oh, am I?” she teased, voice pointed. She leaned forward, just slightly, but right into his personal space. Right into the place he expected her to flinch away from. From here, it would be easy to slam her knee right into his guts with a single leap. This slight shift of weight was as much a threat as it was an invasion. Her moment of surprise. He would not be able to block it. And he knew it.  
He needed space to build up the deadly momentum in his strikes. Here, he had none of it. It was a confined space, and his armour limited his mobility, the mask obscured his field of vision. She was more agile. She could still fight him down.

She spoke, slowly, coldly, and the force was a glint on steel embroidered into her voice: “I am asking conditions because I know what you know. And I know what you don’t know.  
“ _You_ are wounded, and drugged. _You_ are here on your own, Kylo Ren, and your entourage is still far away.” The calm in her voice seared through his opposition, lightly and dreadfully, and the rush of power made her tremble. She felt the spark of doubt kindle within him, and the loose ends of his thoughts caught fire like dry wicks. It was intoxicating to feel his sudden rush of disorientation as the balance of powers shifted slightly in her favour. “You know I will fight. Apart from that, you don’t know what awaits you in this dark ship. All on your own.”

Something slipped past his control, a nostalgic connection to the Falcon, a sliver of old memory, long buried, drenched with bitter longing, drenched in… fear. She saw, heard, touched what was deeply - thoroughly - his, what was not meant to be ever seen again.

Dread flooded his system, the distinct, guilty feeling of a stare at the back of his neck. The stare of someone he owed. Someone he had betrayed. Someone he had loved.

His panic _spiked_.

Before she could even comprehend what she had seen, she found herself caught in a choke-hold, pressed up against the back of the pilot’s seat. His rage burned hot around them as he strangled her through the force, hand only inches away from her face. Wrath engulfed them, blazed like wildfire, charred her skin and churned her insides.

Panic grasped her, hands shooting up at her throat, clawing at empty air, trying for a futile second to free herself of his grip. Then it was gone and she tumbled to the floor, hitting her knees hard. There was blood in her mouth from a bitten lip and her neck hurt. Dizzy and gasping, she did not even try to get back up. Throwing him a murderous glare, she caught him reeling back against the bulkhead, hand still in mid-air, purpose of the gesture forgotten as his shock seized him.

The block broke for a moment.

Emotion spilled between them like water from a breaking jar.

Before he could cover the leak, she had already plunged into it.  
There they were again, at each other’s mercy. He was so vulnerable in his conflict, so distraught and pulled apart between the creature he so desperately ached to be and the fragile human being he was, that it would be easy to rip him apart right now.

Oh, she certainly wanted to take it back out on him, beat him and humiliate him in retaliation for his thoughtless attack. The idea was tempting, stirring up a ravenous desire to hate and blindly violate him, and a part of her itched, craved, raged to do just that, here, now.  
Tear him to shreds in every way she could find, spill his blood and spill his tears. For every single time she had been beaten down, by him or others, for all the blood she had ever spilled on the hands of another. For every single lonely night, for every burn and every wound. For every drop of blood and desperate tear she would take two of his and waste them gladly, joyfully. For once she would wield the power and make him pay for all the debts others had paid on her expense.

She realized too late that she had already crossed the boundary and was dripping, soaking in hatred.

She found herself knee-deep in the morass of the dark, mad place at the back of her mind, on the underside of her heart, lusting to stain herself with its festering puss. There she found him beside her, afraid and full of desire for her demise at the same time, his presence aflame with the same black, charred, tarry lust that filled her up, boiled her alive. Disgusting and beautiful, repulsive and tempting, sticky and grating like sweat and sand.

Shame flooded her, sobered her like frigid water, like a plunge into the cold ocean.

She had brought him down with her, it was her fault that he had seen what no-one was supposed to see. What she had not even been able to show Luke. She wanted to hate herself for falling so low before him, yet she could not find any more hatred within her. She looked at him, inwards and out, and found him mercifully protected by the black shield of his mask.  
Throughout the force, she found him stunned by the sheer force of her rage. There was a malicious delight at tempting her further into this, slowly being drowned under the overwhelming horror of recognizing himself in this dark place within her.

Her shame sobered them both, and she bowed her head.

As she pulled back, he let her go without hesitation.

She dared not look up at him, ashamed and humbled. Neither of them spoke or even moved. He struggled as hard for control of his feelings as she did.

Finally he pushed away from the bulkhead, straightening his back and drawing a deep breath. It was bizarre how shaken he sounded, even with the rasp of the modulator: “There’s a Rescue Barge on its way. It will bring this ship back to headquarters. I’ll see that your demands are met.”

She merely nodded and dragged herself off the floor, knees and neck and the burns on her back protesting.

“I’ll just get my things, then.” Her voice was low and thin. “It won’t take long.”

He let her slip past him without another word, stayed in the cockpit. When she returned minutes later to the boarding hatch, he was already there, waiting. At least he seemed to have gained his equilibrium back. She, on the other hand, felt like a ghost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Anyone wanting to bite me now: feel free :D )  
> (Also... those two...! They really kill me. But in the best way.)


	11. Rotation – Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> They are crackheads. I love them. But they are crackheads.

## Rotation – Part I

_“A rotation is a circular movement of an object around a centre of rotation.”_

 

“You will wait back here.”  
There had been no doubt that his simple order implied more than the meaning of its words, the ‘if you don’t…’ hanging heavy in the air. She had obliged, a bit relieved to be on her own again, as much as the confines of the shuttle allowed.

She was still mortified of what had happened, even more that he had seen her like this. It was hard to pluck her thoughts away from this fatal course. It was even harder to keep them from returning to her shame, riddling her with guilt over losing control and giving into hatred so easily. Slipping into the dark side was easy when he was around. Without even noticing, she had forsaken her training and latched onto…

She abruptly shook her head, snapping the unpleasant string of thought and directed her gaze onto her things on the floor before her. She had sat down on the floor of the shuttlecraft’s passenger cabin a while ago, after it had become clear that he wouldn’t emerge from the cockpit for quite some time. He probably busied himself with transmitting coordinates, plotting a course, planning and instructing her delivery to the First Order. She would not know. Her perception of him was cut clean off by the dark grey durasteel door locking him in the cockpit and his mental block reaching just as far.  
He had not yet cast off from the Falcon. Both vessels were still docked for some ominous reason, the clamps engaged and the hatch still open. It made her wonder. She would have expected him to leave immediately, have his troops pick up the trash. Maybe he had, like her, some stuff to sort through. She would certainly not make the mistake of pressing him.

Instead, she tried to concentrate on meditation. And failed again, thoughts lunging at her. Sighing, she played her fingers over her things, reassuring herself that they were still there. That she was still here, that this was not another nightmare.

The quarterstaff welded from scrap, worn and chunky. Her rough grey woollen jacket that Leia had given her. Her old pair of worn down felt-boots, which were still better than any heavy-duty combat boots Leia had tried to bestow on her. Her satchel with a few tools, a portable comlink and a handful of shrink-wrapped carb rations. And the lightsaber tucked away inside her robes at the small of her back. That was all she had taken with her, apart from the clothes she wore. She was no-one, and the poor assemblage of her belongings reflected it remarkably. It had all fitted in the cradle of her left arm when she came aboard.

It looked very out of place in the strictly functional environment of the Upsilon-class shuttle, casting unruly reflections on the polished black flooring. Her bare feet looked lost and foreign on the flawlessly clean surface. Other than the Falcon, this craft felt very confining, downright claustrophobic with its too sharp angles, too bright lights and shining dark surfaces. It was a nameless machine, a tool to get a job done, not a sanctuary like the Falcon.

The passengers cabin was small, hardly enough room for the narrow seats to fit in. She had purposefully sat down on the floor, quarterstaff across her lap and her back against the stainless grey wall opposite the entrance hatch. It was the farthest stretch of space available in this thing. Not even the narrowest spaces in the fallen ships of the empire had ever felt this restrictive.

The smell was even worse. Sterile, clean, impersonal, inorganic. A bit acrid with cleaning agent, and sickening sweet with the vapour the probably facility-new duraplast wall panels. Nothing in here looked used or worn. It was too clean and she didn’t like it. There was not the slightest effort of achieving a basic level of comfort. Everything seemed to be made for protocol and strict necessity. She simply could not comprehend why the First Order with all its money and wealth would cut back so much on the smallest comforts, making it a downright punishment for anyone having to use this ship for transportation. Even the thin padding of the rowed up seats looked uncomfortable.

The scarceness of the desert had never been as depressing as this compartment, never this sort of an artificial, dehumanized hellhole. She had not the slightest clue how long she would have to wait in here, or where he would be taking her. She only knew for certain that she would lose her mind if she had to stare at too close, too matte, dark-grey duraplast walls any longer.

Her bare feet had grown cold on the floor. She shivered. It was still cold. Something that would not change. There was not much that she missed about Jakku, yet without the constant, hot winds against her skin and the vast stretch of open sky around her, she started to feel… to be…

Was there even a word? It felt like her world was cut down to the size of her cupped hands, like being wilfully blinded, like breathing too thin air, her chest constantly constricting, her feet strapped together to force her into small, helpless steps. The chill of space had the same bite as the heat of the desert sun. It was however much more relentless. It got to places where even sand could not reach. It stuck to her bones, and lived in her muscles, pretending to be a part of her. It would live beneath her skin and beneath her clothes and still crept beneath the hot water and warm blankets she tried to comfort herself with. If sand was bad, this constant cold was a lot worse.

She slipped on her boots and her jacket, but the warmth had dissipated from her skin and the clothes would not warm her. Pushing off from the floor, she started to pace the compartment, still trying to avoid any thoughts of him.

By the time her muscles had finally warmed enough to be no longer straining, she had worked herself into a meditative state, counting her breaths, her footfalls painting a meandering labyrinth on the polished flooring. She didn’t register is presence until he stepped out of the cockpit, eyes tracking her through his mask. She stopped dead in her tracks, turning towards him, watchful and alert, while he approached her. Slow and cautious, as before. His steps fell too loud in the quiet. He circled her, at arm’s lengths, as if he was tracing a forcefield cast around her with the radius of his path. Keeping his distance, never leaving her out of sight. She turned with him, astonished and wondering, trying to keep her face blank and her mind empty.

He came to stand between her and the hatch, charging the silence between them with forbidding power. She knew what this meant. One wrong move and he would snuff out her consciousness. Like on Takodana. The tension made her skin tingle, and she felt her instincts fire up her defences. She forcefully drew a deep breath, shoved the raw memory of shame back down. It was tempting to give into the urge to do anything, _anything_ but wait. This time, she would not let it get out of hand.

“Always so defensive.” He voiced. Not even the modulator’s hollow rasp could hide the mocking softness in his tone. He was wondering, she felt it. Curious, honestly intrigued, stalking her like a predator that had caught a promising scent but was still pondering the risks.

She wilfully relaxed her shoulders, and exhaled slowly. The tension slowly subsided. She hadn’t noticed slipping into a defensive stance, hands drawn before her pelvis, elbows close to her ribs. As she relaxed, she noticed the hunch in his shoulders, how he favoured his right leg, keeping his left arm drawn close to his body.

“I have ensured reparation to your ship’s drive and propulsion, as well as the crucial systems. It will be transported to the _Finalizer_ and there undergo maintenance, as was your wish.” He stated dryly. “You asked a costly price, but none I cannot pay. I am however wondering why you would sell yourself over a few parts, scavenger. Then again, an old habit maybe?”

He enjoyed his mockery, and even more how her anger sparked at his taunt. “I am not selling myself”, she hissed, her teeth on edge. Hating him came painfully easy when his face was shielded from her beneath this horrid mask. And he knew it, he _used_ it. She felt scrutinized, tested, measured. Judged. It was unfair and unsettling, that he could access her so easily, while he blocked her out in every way possible. Another glass wall to shatter herself upon.

A humourless bark of a laugh escaped him. “Of course you aren’t. I bet the price for your life would be my own, given your history.”

“What’s your point?” Her impatient question cut the banter down to business, the memory of her hatred a coppery taste on the back of her mouth, already close to boiling point. She very much wanted to spit it out before him, be rid of it, wanted to forget what had happened. Yet this was something that would forever stain them, and the sole existence of this taint was enough fuelled the darkness inside her even more.

He met it with an equally sharpened answer: “My point is that I have conditions of my own to be met. If you want this… _deal_ to stand and spare yourself to be brought back to the Finalizer as prisoner of war, that is.” His tone was light and measured, almost playful had it not been for the barely hidden edge. It was a farce, a bluff, it always had been. This was not about a bargain for securities or negotiating a truce. It was another mind game, another power-play. He had won it the moment she had lost control over her hatred and dragged him into her darkness, over at the Falcon. They both knew.

Still, she stubbornly played along. He hid something beneath this charade, and she needed to find out. “I have already freely agreed to come with you, wherever that might be.”

“Yes, you have.” He conceded, indicating a slight bow with the mere tilt of his head. It was the cunning mockery of a noble gesture, studied not for manners, but for deceit. “Still, I think you have oversold yourself greatly. Had I been just looking for an escort, there would have been cheaper options. I have risked much in coming here, ridiculously much for someone who loathes me without knowing the slightest about me. Therefore you will have to make up to the price you demanded.”

“Meaning?” She forced her thoughts down into the oblivious twilight of her subconscious mind. This was neither the time nor the place for the childish fears his charade inspired. And she would not grant him another look at them.

She could sense his cold, cruel smile beneath his mask, could hear its acidic tint through his flat, matter-of-fact voice. He kept it purposefully superficial, almost too pointedly not implying anything beyond the modesty of a business contract. “Meaning that if I am to ensure your safety as you demanded, you will need to follow my orders from now on until the deal is considered fulfilled. You will do so unquestioningly and promptly. You will not attempt to run away or steal from me. I promise you to honour our agreement if you can bring yourself to do the same.”

For a moment, Unkar Plutt’s meaty hand was back on her arm, curled around her biceps, dragging her away from the sight of a shuttle breaking Jakku’s atmosphere. She flinched. Another direct hit, dealt in a diplomat's voice. A strike that she had not expected from him. He had seen her past on Jakku, yes, and now he played it against her. For too long she had sold her freedom in rations growing increasingly meagre at prices she could barely pay in parts. Never again.

“I am not one of your soldiers that you can order around like you please. Neither am I your slave, if this is what you are playing at.” She hissed angrily. “If you want me to follow your lead, you will not be the one to determine when our deal is fulfilled. You will let me go whenever I please.”

He measured her silently, motionless. Yet she knew that beneath the helmet, his lips were curling in a victorious smile. She knew it in the way he drank up her anger.

“Good enough.” It was a metallic purr rumbling from his mask, emotion tightly concealed. “You will, however, forgive me if I try to convince you to stay.”

“Depends on your means, Kylo Ren” she replied coldly, his name dripping of her lips like poison. “But do not expect to succeed.”

The nod was barely visible, a mere glint on the steel that framed his forehead gave it away.

They had their truce now. But it felt all wrong. She reached inside and felt the force recoil from the static equilibrium they had achieved through words and reasoning. It was not made in the ways of the force but in the ways of rationality and caution. Once again, she had not listened nor trusted, she had evaluated and forced. And there she was, feeling caged by her own ruleset, a fool once more.

He knew. Yet he didn’t gloat about it. No words, no mockery, no threats. His black-and-silver mask too solid to read anything, his stance too proud. Only a slow and somewhat pained exhale he vainly tried to conceal indicated how troubled he truly was.

He left her with it. Turned swiftly to stride out through the open hatch into the darkness of the Millennium Falcon, with a gait that would have looked self-secure, had not pain trailed its wake. The projection of his voice, dark and laden with something heavy she could not quite place, crackled in her mind like thunder: ‘Wait back here. Do not follow me.’

With this, his presence vanished in the black bowels of Han Solo’s ship. Instead, she felt her senses crash into an impenetrable, obscure glass wall.

Once again, she was left in a too clean, too bright duraplast cage with an open door she was not allowed to exit. Damn him…

…and her, too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...
> 
> Still, they are crackheads.


	12. Rotation – Part II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Phew... happy to get this one off my chest. Hope you enjoy it.

## Rotation – Part II

_“A three-dimensional object always rotates around an imaginary line called a rotation axis. If the axis passes through the body's centre of mass, the body is said to rotate upon itself, or spin.”_

 

It was a mistake. Another in a long row of faults. Of course it was a mistake, because sticking one’s nose into the affairs of others always was. And this was no exception.

Then again, the sudden muffled screech of a lightsaber alongside breaking equipment from other side of the hatch and the building crackle of pain through the force had been an unmistakeable message. As had his order been. She grit her teeth in indecision. The man was a living contradiction of himself. Why send her this when he did not want her to know?

She stood frozen with her hands on both sides of the hatch, one foot already on the floor plating of the Falcon, already halfway through the door. Between the world of light behind her, where she followed his will, and the world of darkness ahead in which she yet again acted against her better knowledge, this was a small rim of twilight.

They said, tidally locked planets were the worst to settle. Only a small habitable area in the twilight band between a scorching light and a freezing darkness, tossed and rattled by tidal forces and super-storms, constantly shaken and constantly torn by earthquakes. What thrived there was of the sturdy kind. This hatch was the twilight band, a safe place for the moment, but she couldn’t stay here for long.

Before her lay the dark wasteland he had retreated into. Before her on the floor, lost like an island in a mirror-flat sea, was a half print of his heavy boot, painted in his blood. There was another stain where he had stood when they talked, and a few others, far vaguer, marking the way he had taken out of the shuttle. Her eyes trained the stain before her, on the Falcon’s plating. It was the anchor of her indecision.

He must have remained there for quite a while, in the shady corridor, given how distinct the pattern stood out in the amount of blood that had gathered under his heel. Maybe while he severed himself from her, she supposed. It had not lasted for long, because the connection had crept back, sneaky and slow. Making her itch for movement, for anything to do but wait.

Something was not right. Compared to how completely he had blocked her while he had remained in the cockpit, he had either lost control or let her in on purpose.

Again, she felt the pull of the force towards this crimson stain and beyond into the shaded hallway of the Falcon. Towards him.

She had waited patiently, meditated, even exercised a bit, sat still and counted her breath, walked rounds on the floor until her head grew dizzy. With no means to measure time, she couldn’t say if it had been hours or minutes since he had vanished aboard the Falcon. She had tried to stay patient, try to do what she was supposed to do, tried to silence her thoughts.

Of course, she had lost the battle. It wasn’t worry on his behalf that made her give in. It was curiosity. And his damn gravity that she found herself unable to resist. It was the force driving her towards him. But ultimately, it was an urge to get out of the confined shuttle, because she could stand small spaces even less than she could stand him. It was, basically, the lack of alternatives that made her take the first step back on the falcon.

The ship was different. She still knew its layout by heart, even in complete darkness, but it felt like crossing a boundary to another level, where the Falcons curved hallways and low ceilings became a metaphor for another world. Like a plane of existence she hadn’t been aware to. There was nothing out of place, and yet everything. It was a spiralling labyrinth now, hiding him in its centre.

She quietly followed the hallway, cautiously placing one bare foot before the other, her right hand trailing the wall for support if necessary. Just a glimpse at whatever was going on, then a quick retreat, if he wasn’t downright bleeding out. She would be gone before he noticed.

She had expected him to search the ship for navigational logs that would lead him to Luke - she had of course taken care of any such evidence beforehand. Half of her had figured he would somehow spoil his father’s legacy. She had half expected him to tamper with the tech or anything, rip out something, or even jerk off at his victory over her. Something a bad person would do. Or _should_ do. That had been before she had heard the noise of destruction.  

He was not a bad person, she knew that much, because there simply was no such thing as a bad person. People did what they did for some reason, however demented it might be. Not agreeing with someone’s lifestyle didn’t make them evil, - or herself good. He was dark and confused, and angry, and driven like a maniac to achieve the status ‘bad person’, yes. She fully expected him to do bad things, because he believed a bad person would do those things.

She had, however, not anticipated _this_ scene.

When she rounded the last corner to the crew’s quarters behind the portside freight hold, she found him kneeling on the floor, his back towards her. He was bent so low that his forehead almost touched the durasteel panel. The helmet was off, cast away. One hand disappeared under the crook of his body, probably clutching his chest, the other lay at his side, his inactive lightsaber useless in his open palm. The room was dimly lit by smouldering, half molten steel and duraplast plating all around, the air hot and filled with smoke and the heavy stench of burnt electronics and blood.

He had turned the small galley on the far end into a sizzling heap of wreckage, littered the walls with deep cuts that still glowed red-hot. She had slept in the cot beside that galley. Now it was wrecked beyond recognition, and with it the blankets she had huddled in.

His lightsaber had painted it with an abstract maze of wrath in deep orange gashes, viciously bright in the dark, turning her safe spot into the wilderness of another’s hunting ground. It was unsettling to behold. She felt betrayed, ripped away from the closest thing to home all over again. Anger rose like bile, but she swallowed it down, focussing on the scene, forcing her mind to analyse. To leave no room for her pain.

The burning patterns on the walls of the cabin spoke of uncontrolled rage. Yet, as she looked closer, she noticed something. There was a point of gravity, a fixed centre to this madness. The majority of the wide-spanning cuts concentrated on the galley, the cot seemed to be just collateral damage. Her pain was just collateral damage. It hit her like a fist. Her anger grew stale, chastened by realization.

He had not done this to desecrate her hideout, probably not intended to hurt her with this. Because this was not meant to be seen by anyone. Most likely, he did not want to lay eyes on it himself, judging by the way he was doubled over, lost in his raging confusion.

Amidst all the chaos, he crouched on the floor, unmoving and completely unaware of her, wrapped deeply in the turmoil of the force. His pain shrouded him like a veil, like it had when she called him here half a day ago. Like the shell-like layers on the ground of the sea.

She stood in shock, her eyes taking in all the details of his destruction, her feet glued into place. Holding her breath, she knew she would be dead if he caught her staring now.

 _Retreat_ , whispered her mind.

 _Stay_ , urged the force.

Her heart said nothing, frozen with panicked indecision.

His voice was quiet, low, yet it cut clean through the sizzle and splutter of smouldering circuitry, cutting clean through her stupor, too. It was laden with hurt, with desperate sorrow and a softness that didn’t befit a man capable of killing his own father in cold blood. It took her a moment to register the meaning of his words, but when she did, they seared her insides:

“You are there. I know it.”

Quiet settled in again, yet the tension didn’t leave. Something seized her, invisible and relentless. For moments only it all seemed to freeze over, sliding into the event horizon of a supermassive singularity that would crush them both.

He strained to wrench the words from his shaking form: “You have always been there. Why don’t you show yourself to me anymore?”

She felt her throat grow tight, fully expecting a force-choke, panic seizing her violently. Of course. He knew she was here. He knew she had seen. He would rip her neck for her intrusion.

This was… death, finally. Of course, at his hand… of course him…

Black stars clogged the side-lines of her vision already. Yet nothing happened. No pain. Nothing.

Then he spoke on, and it was only her fear that clawed at her throat and he still had not noticed her presence.

Her heart beat fast and loud and she was certain he would hear it. She wanted to breathe, nothing more. But she withheld her breath, her body rigid with fear. Slowly, she retreated into the darkness of the hallway, yet not completely out of sight, while he went on, his voice trembling in pain:

“I am conflicted. It doesn’t stop. The light grows stronger every day and I can’t stop it. It hurts. It hurts so much. I burn and nothing I do will stop it. Why won’t the dark side accept me as it once had? Why can’t you just show me again?”

He was pleading, pushing himself up again, face directed away from her, shoulders sagging, neck craned in looking up at the smouldering mess he’d made. Both hands drawn to his chest now, the lightsaber entirely forgotten. The fiery glow from the walls framed his head like a sinister halo. He was there, merely a few feet away and yet untouchable, the distance between them could as well have been the whole expanse of the galaxy.

“Grandfather.” The word was a breath, faint and longing. It was a prayer, intimate, personal, and she was watching what she was not supposed to see, what no-one was supposed to see.

This was not her place. She did not deserve to see this, she could not endure this intimacy. She felt like a thief, taking from him what was not freely given. His words were guilty pieces, picked up on the side-lines of a scavenging hunt, idle pleasure to be hidden away in her shelter, collected, cherished, and never sold.

This destroyed, reeking cabin, enclosing him in ruin was his temple. As the wall full of markings and the shelf with all the useless trinkets had been a temple for her. They both prayed to the god of loneliness and desperation, the god of wishes lost in dried tears and desert sand.

Like her, he was lonely. A weakness, a wound they both shared. Like her, he hurt. She knew this, intimately, from countless nights when the imagined island in the endless ocean had been all that kept madness at bay. When escaping into a fantasy had been all that saved her from losing her mind, knowing that no-one would ever come for her, comfort her, save her.

“It is too much.” So silent it was almost missed beyond the sounds of the wreckage, whispers wrapped in smoke.

“I am afraid. She said it, I am not enough to be like you. I can’t hold up against it. I am failing you, grandfather.”

She heard his breaths, quivering, heavy with pain. All his strength, his power drained from him. He was nothing like the steel-edged shadow he wished to impersonate. In this, he was raw, hurt, wounded, vulnerable, and soft. It was the first time he appeared to be truly himself, truly human. The first time she didn’t sense any conflict in him.

This was him, Kylo Ren was just an armour, just a shell he could hide himself in. Another glass wall that others could not penetrate. They would only see the mirror image of their projection, but not him. They would fear what they wanted to fear in him, but they would not fear him. He was safe inside. Safe, and dying.

“Forgive me.” He sighed, drawing the breath out until it faded, until there was no more to let go of. “Forgive me. I am not strong enough for this.”

A groan escaped him, low and terrifying. It was a sound forged from long stoked pain and desperation. The hairs on her forearms stood up. And the push of the force intensified.

His head sank and his words were merely whispered: “I only wish you could show me the way, like you did. I wish you didn’t leave me. I wish… I wish you were still here.”

_I wish you could come back for me._

Those were her words. Her prayer to the endless stars, night after night, marking after marking on the rusting walls of her bolthole. _Come back. Be here_. Her one, lonely wish in the dead of the night. There was never anyone.

But she _was here_ _now_.

Her hammering heart skipped a beat as she realized. She was here, and in his place she saw herself, praying to the darkness. She could not end it for herself, now or ever. Although it hurt that there would never be anyone for her, she understood that she could end the loneliness if not for herself, then for him. Here. _Now_.

It hurt, split her heart in two under the shattering weight of the force wanting this. It was a blurry rush of a thousand colours, not light, not dark, all funnelling and melting into a glimmering, undulating grey, sand and water under the stars. She could not resist this, even though it felt like being flayed alive, inside out, as it stripped her pride away from her, as it tore from her every envious wish of receiving this grace herself. She was not made to resist this powerful surge of energy and if she tried, it would rip her apart.

This was necessary, no matter how much she got hurt in the process.

And it hurt so very much. She was a furnace drawing on a storm, and the tears in her eyes were molten glass, as they burnt her alive. When she took the first silent step towards him, the force caught fire around her. It flamed brighter and warmer than anything she had ever felt. Like a star igniting right inside her chest. The power that rushed through her made her tremble with its raw force. It carried her to him on silent, sure feet, it lead all her movements, exerting a gravity that was impossible to escape.

He sensed it, turned just the slightest, eyes closed. He felt the pull towards her and it resonated deeply within him. Her hand found his shoulder, lightly, the touch of a ghost.

Yet it was there. He drew a shuddering breath, suffocated by relief and sadness, as he leaned gently into it. The simple touch cascaded through him like an earthquake, shattering him. His pain bloomed wildly, showered her like cold rain and clouded her like smoke. His mind was before her now, and the turmoil stilled, crystalized into a scene from long ago. The hand of a ghost on the shoulder of a sobbing boy, calming him, guiding him. The scene vibrated with the same power that raked through her now. Slowly she poured herself over the image, like balm, like warm water over cool skin. Swept him back out of his memory, back into the destroyed quarters where he knelt before her, shoulders shaking under her touch.

There was recognition in his eyes as he opened them to her. Shaken and captured, eyes wide and soft. There was no conflict within him now. Only a stillness that was foreign, yet welcome. He recognized her, he _knew_ what she was, _who_ she was. And this alone stilled all the pain in him at once. There were no barriers between them and she saw his mind with absolute clarity. No chaos, no turmoil, the upturned shattered pieces settling down slowly, clicking into place, forming a smooth, strong current strumming with renewed energy. And all his wild, unruly power was bound into it. Something whole. And very strong.

Like she had seen Han Solo’s death through his eyes, she saw herself now, almost aglow with the power of the force, as she knelt down beside him, never taking her hand off his shoulder. His thoughts cascaded into her mind, a waterfall, forming a pool, a creek, a river strong and broad, and where he met her they became the ocean.

She was the ghost he had hoped to conjure up, yet she was here, real and warm beside him. And there he was, still disbelieving this could be real. So afraid to reach out and find her gone in a puff of smoke, an insubstantial figment of his desperate imagination.

‘I am here’, she offered and the thought echoed between the two of them for endless moments.

When he finally accepted it, it took all his courage. He faltered before her. Head bowed low, shaken by helpless tears of relief. His hands fell to his sides. Yet still leaning into her touch.

She gave it to him, freely, unconditional, no treaty necessary to ensure their connection. He gave into it as she slid forwards, catching him as he sank into her embrace.

She had imagined this for so long. Being held whilst the terror of her nightmares subsided, being allowed to be at her weakest. Being allowed to heal. It was this wish – never granted – that had cut up her soul and sowed rot into it. Time and time again.

Seedlings of darkness she had called them. Those rotting, unfulfilled wishes that dwindled beneath the canopy of her isolation. She had thought all hope for them lost, yet now she found that all those years, she had hid it just beyond the reach of their feeble roots.

And now, as he leaned against her, heavy and warm, and so, _so_ real, she found him pouring down into her most hidden darkness, a water cold and crisp and cleansing. She let him, made room for him, and gave him all she had hidden there, because in this she found the strength she had begged for so long.

For so long, so many years, she had split herself up, living divided between the light she sought and the darkness she was. Seeking to hide the darkness from herself.

With him against her, she did not need to receive comfort to give it, yet she received it because she gave it, following a will that was greater than her own cravings. In this, the conflict she had nurtured was futile, and she finally could let go of it. He had already seen the mess within her, and she had seen his. There was nothing to hide anymore and no need to do so.

He traded his light for her darkness, rinsed the morass from the roots her wishes had grown, breaching the canopy of pretence, letting light in, and air. And the wound hurt less. It would heal. It was not much, but it was everything.

It was enough. _He_ was enough.

It made her tremble, and only now she realized the tears on her face streaming into his hair. Dark, soft hair with a scent too familiar.

He trembled with her, his weakness not a wound anymore, but acceptable. It was _enough_ for her, and it was the first time he was enough for _himself_. It was not bad, to be wounded, it only were wounds. They would heal when they had fulfilled their purpose. His pain was only a messenger, telling him clearly and loudly, that he did not need to go where he did not belong. He had not listened to the meaning, had gone half mad with the multiplying noise of his torment. Ignored its message and stumbled on, down a path that brought him nothing but more pain.

Now, in her arms, the pain was not screaming at him, not drowning his mind in its madness. And now, he accepted it. It was only there, not something to avoid or endure. He listened and found it lessen with every passing moment. Found it even giving him strength when he understood what it meant. Strength far beyond any ounce of power he could have squeezed from the lacerations inflicted on himself.

Understanding was a melody that needed to be drawn from the clangour of pain, a delicate measuring of forces, as difficult as it could be easy, depending on trust.

Smiling into his hair, with his thoughts echoing in her own mind, her shame dissolved into her tears, into a sadness that grew brighter with each breath she drew at his side.

‘I’m sorry’ she said.

‘I know’ he said. ‘I am, too. I didn’t listen.’

‘It’s fine’ she smiled. ‘Now we do.’

‘Now we do’ he agreed. And she knew he smiled, too, because his smile curved her own lips, and his sigh shattered her own chest.

It was enough. It was enough for now.   

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued.
> 
>  
> 
> So, what do you think, pace O.K. or could go faster? ;-)
> 
>  
> 
> And a very Happy Valentines Day to all of you who celebrate it.


	13. Equilibrium – Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am very sorry, this took a while. Life is what got in the way while I was busy making other plans... So yeah, everything sorted out now, I hope. But hey, the chapter's extra long this time. Thanks again for all the lovely comments on the last chapter - I really appreciate all of your feedback! So... here we go.

## Equilibrium – Part II

_“When subjected to change, a system at equilibrium will tend to stay at equilibrium and a system not at equilibrium will tend more toward equilibrium.”*_

He was barely conscious now. Leaning heavily against her, breaths coming shallow and irregular. His powers had dwindled rapidly once he had fully opened up to her. She had goaded him to get out of the smoke, putting distance between them and the smouldering mess. They had made it almost to the hatch, just outside the rear freight hold, when he had crumbled right on the spot. Too depleted to go any further, he had just collapsed. And almost taken her down with him. She had somehow managed to keep them both from a rather indignant face-first encounter with the deck plating by pushing him sideward into the bulkhead and slowly letting him slide to the ground.

That was where they lay now, right around the corner of the boarding hatch, cast in the pale half-light streaming from his command shuttle. She was wedged uncomfortably between the bulkhead’s beams and the dead weight of his torso, keeping him close to her, arm wrapped around his shoulders. His head resting on her left shoulder, she could feel his breath play around her neck and chin, and his strained heartbeat against her breast. His elbow pressed into her stomach, hand curling around her other shoulder, the other arm lay loosely around the small of her back, tucked into the space between her pelvis and the base of the rounded wall plating, fingers burrowing into the cloth of her tunic. Their legs were all tangled up over the width of the corridor. Managing to at least hoist herself up far enough against the wall that she could support his weight, she struggled to keep herself breathing under his weight.

Damn, he was heavy. She couldn’t tell if he at all enjoyed to be this close to someone he probably hated. He was simply too out of it to realize anything at the moment. His mind was a wash of instinctual perception and reaction, cognitive processes slowed down to a minimum. The feedback she received from him as he bonelessly huddled against her was made up of two major portions:

The first thing was the pain. Only corporeal pain now, his mental strain and any focus on it completely dissolving in the cacophony his nerves blasted out. It was giving her a biting headache. She had seen him on a sickbed when she had called him out here. And he was mad, irresponsible and an utter idiot to do anything but _stay_ in that damn bed – or a kriffin’ Bacta tank for all she cared. He was so utterly messed up she didn’t even know what to begin with…

Half a dozen fractured ribs? Three or more cauterized stab wounds from a lightsaber fight? Badly healed older wounds, cuts, rips and slashes, some of them enflamed, others already rimmed with scar tissue but scratched open over and over for some idiotic reason? A deep gash in his side, currently ripped open and bleeding out again?   
She sighed, as another wave of agony washed into her. The large bruises on his back, chest and legs seemed almost insignificant against all this damage. As did the broken toe, the twisted joints, the pulled muscles. She knew he drew his strength from pain, but this was just horrific. How did he even manage to function on this level of constant pain? He was in no condition to go anywhere, sustaining this amount of damage, least of all to hunt down stranded enemies of the First Order. She really, really hated him for this, for being in this kriffin’ awkward situation now because of his recklessness.

It was absolutely incomprehensible why he would submit himself to this madness. To prove something? To prove he was indeed an immortal, inhuman machine? None of those wounds were lethal on their own, but the damage added up. It was a dangerous flirt with death, and he could call himself lucky that death’s backhand caught him when there was someone around to catch him.

Coming here and confronting her seemed way too desperate to make any sense at all. She had pulled off similarly stupid stunts, but that always been a last resort kind of thing to get herself back to safety. Mostly when she had been wounded, or sick, and the only alternative had been a lonely, painful death.

Stealing Bacta from a pack of Raiders while sporting a gushing leg wound and a burning fever, unarmed and halfway delirious. Climbing a three stories high power-shaft slick with her own blood that she had been thrown down after a poorly picked fight with another scavenger, with her broken arm useless at her side and her fingers cut on the sharp edges of the splintered duraplast she was dragging herself over. Running through the desert with no water for two days straight because she had lost her way in a sandstorm, not accepting dying of thirst as an option. Stupid things like that. Highly risky, staking her life against a ridiculously small possibility of success.

In situations like those, there was no room for questions like ‘why’ and ‘what for’. Nobody did anything like that because they wanted to. And he did not seem nearly mad enough to actually want what he was doing to himself. She did not understand _why_ he did this, what motivation drove him to shatter himself like this.

Then again, the way his subconscious mind washed right into her consciousness, fully open and completely at ease, was downright unsettling.

That was the second thing she got from him, and it would have been the most beautiful thing she had ever shared with someone had it not been for the pain, hers and his. His openness was breathtaking, even if he did not do it on purpose. There was trust, so complete, so complex and intimate, that she could not help but wonder. It was the trust of a child, long held back, long avoided and neglected, but now helplessly rushing forward and latching onto every bit of warmth and safety it could find.   
She let it and cradled it, embraced it as she embraced him, astonished and somewhat grateful. It was a bit like falling on a dune’s slope and sliding down into it, finding herself half buried in warm, heavy sand. He was everywhere, engulfing her completely. Even with his consciousness reduced to a few flickering, unstable images, there was so much light.

Maybe this was the driving force behind his actions, something he could not control because he did not even want to accept its existence. Yet it still controlled him.

His consciousness flickered, having picked up her line of thought. He projected something hard, rough, like rock. Denial. ‘No…’ his mind slurred, stumbling over the syllables like a drunk ‘… cannot be. This is… not…’ His head tilted, his forehead pressing into her neck now, while for a second his fingers dug hard into her shoulder. When she flinched in pain, he relaxed immediately.

“Cannot be what? Light? You can’t be light?” she asked him, voice soft but curious, not even trying to project - with him in this feeble balance against her, the words playing through the dark ruffle of his hair. She enjoyed the sensation, the tickle of hair against her lips, the oddly spiced scent of his scalp, soft and rough, warm and dark like the taste and texture of roasted bread freshly taken from the fire.

For a moment he seemed to consider speech as well, eyes flicking open and closing again, but he had still only limited control over his mind, even less over his body. Instead of a verbal projection, he altered the image he had already given her, the rock smoothing out into even darkness, solid and steady. He was afloat in it, weightless and safe. The unidimensional existence cradled him, unbiased and at ease. It was peaceful and infinite. Then he altered the image again, casting a single ray of light into it. Suddenly, there emerged contrast. Conflict. The light unveiled dimension, it demanded orientation. The suspension he had enjoyed before was now subjected to gravity. Finding a balance against it became struggle, and struggle called up a chain of endless action and reaction. A chain that limited his reach and the potential of his power. The infinite being he had been before was now restricted by quantities, by measurements and perception. The peace was gone.

“Is this what light means to you?” she asked again, somewhat baffled.

He did not respond at first, barely holding onto coherent thought now, his pain covering his mind like dust. He tried to pick up an image that she could understand, but failed, his mind sinking into chaos. This exchange diminished his energy even further and she nearly lost him to the pull of unconsciousness. He didn’t even fight it. Losing him would not do. This was important, he needed to stay. She knew this by instinct - and by instinct, or on command of the force, she reacted.

She gave him an image instead of the chaos engulfing him, poured her energy into him, anchoring him, binding him to her own gravity. She filled his mind with a structure it wasn’t able to provide on its own.

It was a simple scene, a memory of something she had enjoyed. Turning the dust into golden sand, she projected a dune under a firmament strewn with the first stars of the night sky and awash with the last colours of sunset. They lay there on the slope, just beneath the crest, half sunken into the still hot sand, the breeze on their skin not yet chilled by the cool of the night. The silence so heavy it came alive, creamy and velvety, blanketing them softly as the sun withdrew its veils of fire from the horizon. Making room for an infinite ocean of darkness in which their dune was an upside-down island. Hovering over the depths of the darkness like a spoon over a bowl of water, the two of them were a droplet at its underside, ready to fall back onto the surface of the night.

She had always loved the serenity of dusk, when the day was done and the last thing to do was to let go of it. Often she had just laid down in the sand and let the stars guide her to sleep.

In the way he sunk into the vision she knew that he had done so, too. It was familiar, and he welcomed it easily.

The constellations around them awoke with time passing, told silent stories and called to them, another each night, starships passing through their enormous bodies like fish under the waves. The planet beneath them turned, encompassing them in its complex structure, and with them adrift in the vastness of space, bound into an intricate system of forces. Yet, it was free and limitless in the possibilities this universe provided for them and their little planet of sand. Light made those forces visible, mapped out the ways they made among the darkness. Light provided order in seemingly infinite complexity. Yet with their bodies sinking into the hot, dry sand and their eyes drinking up the star-speckled blackness of the night sky, they found themselves being children of both, light and darkness.

She felt him relax against the pull she provided, letting her energy in and giving into it, at peace. Her energy, her memory brought structure to his drowning mind again, accumulated chaos into meaning. Slowly, he regained control over his thoughts and she noticed them coming and passing like wisps of night wind. The image was his reality now, while his perception was still not able to function normally.

She noticed in this moment how perception layered around them, mostly around him. How it cocooned this inner black core of darkness adrift, of calm eternal, unconscious acceptance. Around it formed emotions, memories, dreams, thoughts, ideas, concepts and structure. Encompassing it in shelf upon shelf and coat upon coat.

Each layer worked on a certain level of energy, and the more energy she poured forward, the more solid the layers became. When dream solidified into reality for him, and thought only just came to pass, she found a strangeness in the way his thoughts encountered hers.

It was clear that he knew this process of rebuilding his world, intimately, straight to the point where he was welcoming it. Still he expected rules to it that she seemed not to provide. It was not strange for him that it happened, but that it happened through her. She was not the first to rebuild his world for him. She was just not the one who _usually_ did it.

It frightened her, that thought. Did he mistake her for someone else?

No. He knew there was a difference. He knew it clearly, and she felt how he wondered about it, almost afraid. In the way he held himself back she could only guess that there was usually a price he paid to get this. A price he did not like to pay.

Doubt rattled her. Should she even be doing this to him? Forcing her own imprint on him? Was this even good? Was it the dark side? She had not thought…

For a single moment, the flow of energy dispersed, the image became grainy, oversaturated, and unreal. His block came back up, the pain dulling his newly cleared senses again. But he could not keep her out, weakened as he was, and his defiance faltered immediately.

Doubt felt like a blocked drainage, damming up all the nasty bits and tainted thoughts behind it, forcing the flow of energy to a standstill. Driving it into restriction, and it would need to do a lot of damage to break free again. Only with an effort, and a deep breath, she let go of her doubts, let the force pour forth, while trying her hardest to concentrate on the dunes and the turning planet among thousands of stars.

Once noticed, it was hard to keep one’s eyes from a stain. Not to poke around the gash, and pull the dirt out. And she very much wanted to. Wanted to worm herself into this doubt, dig around the insides of that wound until she knew everything he tried to hide from her. It was a lusting greed and she felt herself grow weak to its temptation, falling under its possession incrementally. Thinking of resisting it only dragged her deeper. The flow of the force ceased again.

Only this time, he caught her before she could fall. Offering all energy that remained in him, as if this was a sacrifice necessary to keep his world from collapsing.

The word rasped out barely above his breath, hot against her neck, so sudden it made her shiver with a jolt of raw power surging through her: “Stay.”

This one word was enough to break through her doubt and pull her from the trap she had caught herself in. It shook her like an earthquake, in body and mind, snapping her back into her own body. It felt odd, like flying her speeder again for the first time after a too long while. It was just as liberating. The force poured from her again, like a river overflowing from a broken dam. He sighed against her skin, pumping fuel into the engine that her heart had turned into. A wild, strumming beast running on a power that was unknown to her. Running far and furious, never satiated.

She grew hyperaware of him, his scent of sweat and blood, smoke and foreign spices. Of the slight brush of his hair against her cheek, and how it tickled right under her ear. How his legs pressed up against her own. How his heartbeat seemed to blend with her ribcage. How every breath of his set her skin aflame and made her body tense with something she could not place.

How could he be so tainted, so destroyed and wrecked, and yet so whole and intoxicatingly innocent? How could he feel so safe in her arms right now, when all he wanted was to bring her down?

She could only wonder. Wonder if he would answer that himself one day.

Desert blended into deck plating and constellations paled on the backdrop of the hallway’s ceiling. They were still half present, like in a lucid dream, too real to be imagined and at the same time not believable enough to be accepted as reality. She let them fade slowly. His thoughts, incoherent and formless at first, grew into shape, bonding, interconnecting into sense, mapping this half-solid dream world with curiosity. He began to understand. Wondered.

Some of the thoughts, blurry lines mostly, tangled, laced together, sprung ideas like wire mesh models, very basic at first, but gaining complexity. ‘Where am I?’ was a prominent one, or the jumpy, flickering ‘why’, that popped up everywhere at once. And curling around the fringes of his perception like a treacherous Badland-Viper there was a shyly asked ‘is it you, Master?’   
The answers to those questions were threading through his conception of her. She let him work on them, watched them grow into a constant string of impulses and feedback, enfolding into an intriguing dialogue.

Objections were send out like sensor impulses, and when they returned with responses from his surroundings, his mind crafted them into new objections or structure that solidified or changed the current idea it was working on, multiple places at once.

The idea that was her was currently formed from several attributes, a huge cloud of images, feelings and conceptualisations. ‘Warm, bony, soft’ was one feedback he got from her, another was ‘Peace, safety, comfort.’ There were occasional commands popping up, mostly bubbling up from his subconscious: ‘Emphasize safety, infuse trust’.   
As he was building his perception of her from scratch, she carefully listened and watched as she became a fixed point in space for him. A gravitational centre amassed and formed from the cloud of attributes.

His thought-process created a map of her, charted the vastly unknown territory of her mind and measured it, compared it, gave it names. Gaining speed as it gained ground. Made her known to him, only slowly connecting it to existing memories.

Unease grew, as the loose cluster of information suddenly formed a meaning, a concept. A concept that meant: _Battle, defeat, punishment. Humiliation. Enemy. Enemy. Enemy_. All senses calling for panic, for flight. He couldn’t. He was bound by force. By a residue of the warmth and peace that was still there.

_Why am I at peace?_ A flicker of Leia’s image, and he stilled in longing, only to give in to anger and shame warring each other for the span of a heartbeat. Then another memory, similar in texture. Another shade of peace. Cast in power, like a volatile gas would be cast in carbonite. Raw power. Dark, invincible. _Anger, hatred, control. Vader. Protection_.

The protection of a master, always there, knowing. Out of reach by arm’s length. A powerful master, strong in the force. A master that whispered, guided, showed. Not aggressive, not invasive. Merely there. There, when no-one else was. The image of Leia again, bent over him with a sad smile on her face, already flickering, and paling. Distorting into a horridly wounded, grotesque face. A bent figure stepping out of the shadows with a friendly hand offered, cloaked in many memories. Through him, the force facetted, multiplied into a full spectrum. The force was alive.

There was force here, too.

_Force. But not Vader’s. Not master’s either, but so much like theirs. Still different. More edges, more open. Not molten and polished into glass, not crooked and bent and still thriving. Like an ocean, like sand. Elusive. Warm. Determined._

_Her._

“ _You!_ ”

He jolted up, his power surging. Pushed away from her, on his back, elbows hitting the plating. Eyes wide on his pale face with the horrid scar dissecting it. The broken intimacy stretching thin between them, dragging the warmth away and bleeding it out into the frigid air.

He scrambled away, freaked, as if she was the vilest thing he had ever seen. His back hit the bulkhead across the hallway. A pained whimper escaped his lips. Clutching his left side, he slumped down against the wall. He was still not blocking her, confused by the deep feeling of peace that still connected them, no matter how much he tried to be afraid of the enemy across the hall. Still not quite getting his head around how she fit into this. His mind still reeling to make sense of it all.

The shadow of the hallway almost swallowed him. In contrast, she remained in the half-light cast around the corner from the boarding hatch. Light and darkness, and he and she only ever met where they bled into each other. Twilight zones and star-less void-space, the infinite grey areas between two points of extreme. The balancing point, the equilibrium.

“Me”, she answered dryly. Pushing herself up a bit and stretching her aching shoulders. They locked eyes in the twilight. He looked feverish, and hurt. The scar she had given him stood out on his face, putting his features even more at odds. He was gaunt, eyes deeply shadowed, lips bloodless, a dark bruise showing just above his collar. He was a shadow himself. Since they last met, he had lost weight and confidence, and now with the helmet gone, he seemed even more fragile than ever before.

There was blood on the floor where he had dragged himself from her, and there was blood on her tunic, too, right where his chest had pressed into her ribcage. And on her lower arm, dark, glistening stains, slashed by dirty white where it had not seeped through the creases of the fabric.

“Look”, she said, trying to keep her own mind clear and calm. “I didn’t ask for this. If I scared you, I’m sorry.”

His response was immediate, and its honesty startled her: _Don’t be._

She gave him an incredulous look. He lowered his gaze, clearly ashamed of spluttering out like this. Desperate to regain a semblance of composure again, he added: “It’s not like that.” The weak, breaking voice didn’t do it any good, either.

At his weak defiance, she couldn’t help but smile. Through the connection she knew that he meant it nevertheless. Her openly projected appreciation of his honesty at least made him ease up a bit. There was relief in him, and he did not hide how glad he was about the contact. Still, her influence lingered in his system, and she felt his resistance coming up again the intrusion.

“Whatever”, she said, dragging her mind back into the now, into the conversation. “See, it’s alright. I’m not afraid of you, Kylo Ren. And you can stop pretending that I have to be.”

He only eyed her conspicuously. The block came up again, but half-heartedly. He clearly did not want it in place. And he clearly did not want to be separated from her. But his fear reared its head, made him put up the block, made him afraid of every bit of her energy he was currently running on. It was an old fear, rooting deep, vanishing in a darkness she could not peer into. He was clearly afraid of the consequences he expected. She could not access his thoughts as clearly as before, but it was obvious that with joining their minds they – he – had violated some vital rule of his codex. Yet he wanted it. Her. Her peace. The sanctuary that she was. Badly.

The conflict was back in him, raging, clashing, and it showed in his gaze drilling into hers, in his lips pressed together. It was strange to see. It was him, as he used to be, as she knew him, but not as he was meant to be. Now that she knew him at peace, war didn’t fit him any longer.

“For what it’s worth, I’m tired of fighting you”, she offered. “Maybe we can find another way to work this out.”

He measured her with his gaze. The block tightened on his fear, but still not cutting the connection. His pain was very clear to sense, as was the pull on him towards her, and the ease at her warmth, yet he needed the distance the block gave him. Beneath its cover, she felt him gather his remaining strength. Speaking was still too much an effort for him, so he resolved to projection:   
‘Why would you offer that, girl?’

“My name is Rey.” The words rang heavy, a bit too heavy. She felt lost in this half-conversation. Having a soliloquy with a stranger, as she often had within the last decade of her life. With the shadow on the opposite wall being the only thing that would listen to her, when the evening sun wouldn’t. She had told the shadow, day after day, that she was still here, she was still alone, still waiting. Still Rey. Only this time, the shadow had eyes that watched her too closely, gave answers that touched her a bit too deeply to be easy.  
Another long, knowing gaze from shaded eyes. ‘I know.’   
“Then use it”, she demanded, voice hushed.   
He didn’t respond, merely staring her down with knowing eyes. Yes, he definitely knew her. In the thrum of the force around them she found the affirmation she needed. He knew _exactly_ who she was. But he chose to stake a high price for it. Whatever it was that he kept beyond the block on their link.

‘Just answer my question, would you? Why would you offer me such a truce?’ he asked without catering to her demand.  
Her answer came swift, and as confident as desperate: “Because I don’t feel that fighting is what we should do. I know there is another way, and we are meant to go it.”

Something shifted. The contrast of his dark irises against the white of his eyeballs went awry. The stare grew even more intense, black bleeding into negative colour. The image of the half-lit corridor graining again, as if a cloud of dust suddenly filled the air between them. The formerly weightless twilight gaining crushing mass. He was difficult to focus, all black on a dark backdrop, silhouetted, his pale face flat like the counterfeit of a ghost. Untouchable, but part of the shadow that embraced them both, that stuck to their bodies like tar.

His eyes exerted their own gravity, black holes that drew her near, no matter how hard she tried to tear away. Like a hyperdrive threatening to burn out against a supermassive gravitational force, her heart throbbed in her chest.

Something had taken his place. Right now, across the floor, feet still tangling with hers, sat a shadow.

Feral, voracious, something that thrived from pain, something that drank murder. Not quite living, not quite dead. An ancient darkness, oversaturated and unreal. Something burning, slowly, coldly. A Neutron Star, a collapsed sun. Something that made the hairs at the back of her neck go up, something that made fear tighten her muscles with the need to defend herself. Some thing that could creep into the shadows, formless and fluid, and forge them into blades and maces to rip her flesh and shatter her bones. A thing so dark and vile and beyond her power that she felt her throat constrict from the sheer thought of its presence.

She could not make out if it was this thing that usually wore the man like a mask, or if that thing was the guise for a human who still lived beneath that darkness.

His words were a purr from between sharp fangs, the leisurely drag of claws over exposed flesh. And so bitter, so hurt that the ache of it poured right down her spine: _‘_ A creature in a mask, you said. Watch closely, and tell me again: Why offer a truce, when all you truly want to do is kill it?’

He tasted her fear through the connection, savoured it, inhaled every bit of it like the last breath of clean air he’d ever have. Yet, he remained impassive, just observed her reaction as he let his words drip into her mind, like acid poured on bare skin. He turned the game, balanced the board, and when the world faded into oblivion around his eyes, she knew he had levelled their powers.

Where she had watched his thoughts create perception mere moments ago, he now watched her mind unsettle. Saw it undo the strict order of her views, while he retreated even further behind the block. Observed, as her believes lost contours and crumbled.

He stoked the smoulder even more. ‘How much worth holds the promise of peace from someone carrying a weapon inside their cloak?’   
“I don’t”, she said, too quickly, answering both questions at once, shivering in unease and sudden cold. He had separated almost completely now, and all his warmth was gone. Instead of his mind, he now let his eyes speak, and they made clear that he did not believe her.

Only then she realized. The press of the lightsaber against her back, completely forgotten while she was sharing his mind. Her cheeks grew hot when she realized the blatant, unthinking lie she had just spoken.

Through the connection, he knew. He commented it with a strange mixture of disappointment and amusement. ‘I thought so. But that’s not what I meant. _’_

“What is it, then?” she asked, feeling trapped and stupid. Not hiding from him at all how much she was truly afraid of him.   
‘You fear me so much, little Rey. All those thoughts in your mind, all those expectations, all those screaming instincts to run from the monster. Or fight it and kill it. You think I cannot hear them? ‘, he projected calmly, calmer than he had expected from the likes of him. Almost too friendly.   
“Listen to yourself. You’re doing it again right now”, he whispered when he sensed her thoughts, the words slurring from his dried lips, breathless, throaty and cracking. Still, there was softness in his tone, and warmth. Not disdainful, only a bit disappointed, a bit sad.   
‘Is this really the peace you are offering me? I’d call that freezing in fear in the face of a monster you’d rather see dead. _’_

She could only stare at him, mind going blank, while he closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the wall. This was not the tone a cold-hearted monster would use. It was the voice and the words of someone who cared, someone who saw, and wanted to help.   
Even absolutely devastated and wrecked, he had bested her. In this, he had offered her the peace she wanted, he had sealed the truce she had hoped for. And she had not noticed, expecting him to play her once more. She had asked for peace, but expected a battle. As if this was still a damn competition for the best piece of kriffin’ scrap…

She exhaled, mortified. And suddenly, the thing made of shadow lost its threat. Dissolved into thoughts. Her thoughts. Her expectations. The creature of darkness was her own invention. The monster was the name _she_ had given him. She had seen him kill his own father and assumed he was evil. She had felt him pull her mind apart and told herself he did not care. Because he had not let her in, she had presumed that there was nothing.

Her own reflection on the wall of glass inside him had become her concept of him. She had made him her enemy because he had touched what was hers, even only briefly, not looking for her belongings, but someone else’s. Because the people who touched her possessions usually did not care for her life and were quick to waste it for their gain. In a world where anything but nothing was everything, losing anything was fatal. And everyone fought very hard for the very least. She was no exception, and she was too well accustomed to this bloody rule to see around it.

She had allowed her thoughts to warp reality into something that was just not there and had not even questioned it.

“You are right”, she muttered. It was hard to admit, and it pressed on her heart like a whole damn planet. “I am sorry. I don’t know anything about you and yet I judged you. But believe me, I do not want to see you dead.”

He took the apology without a response, only loosened the block a little. She felt a strange tranquillity in him, like in meditation, carefully kept neutral.

A long silence stretched between them. The calm after the storm. He grew still, in body and mind, only the sound of his shallow breathing reminding her that he was still there, that he had not faded into the shadows. It was not uncomfortable, this quiet. Still she found unease growing in her heart, worries spilling into her mind. There were many memories of past fights that came up now, flickering painfully into her consciousness. Of people she had beaten down. Not all of them had fallen victim to simple self-defence.

Some of them she had punished for her own frustration. On some of them she had dumped her own shadow, let them taste her own darkness, and had paid her shame in their blood. They had followed her like a long row of ghosts. Into the hollow husks of the fallen star-ships, and under her thin blanket at night. It had been them who had answered her nightly prayers for someone to come with a stinging remainder of who much she had tainted herself in guilt to survive: ‘But why would anyone come back for a dirty, filthy, worthless rat like you?’ She was very much the monster she had accused him to be. Just before she could work herself into her guilt again, he interrupted.

Carefully plucking her mind from the bitter, intense memories, he brought her back into the present: ‘Don’t fear me. You can’t remember, but I had my chance at doing you harm. A long time ago. I chose not to. This still stands _.’_

At this, her chest constricted and the force burst into life around her. Energy rushed through her in a frenzy of sudden excitement and dread at the same time. He had known her. Before. _Before_ Jakku. Before she had become Rey, the scavenger. Before she had taken that name and tried not to lose hope.

He knew her and she was here, with him. They were at peace, and it was the right thing. Finally, the _right_ thing. The right place. Another step reached on her journey home. It was here, the threshold to the past. It was with him. She could not tell if it was joy, ripping at the foundations of her hope, or pure, untamed terror of what he would show her. A shudder ran through her. She felt him sense it, too. Among the torrents of pain running through his body, she felt the trickle of her glee and how he… _cherished_ it.   
“So it’s true then. You _do_ know”, she whispered, desperately trying to keep her voice steady, but failing poorly.

He nodded slightly, eyes still closed, their minds carefully keeping their limits. _‘_ Yes. I do. _’_

“Will you tell me?”

He choked out a breathless laugh at her overflowing hope and her shattering relief when he nodded again.

They both found each other strangely glad to have found some common ground after all. In the silent joy he nurtured at this question, she found it again: That strange nostalgia he wanted to enjoy as much as he feared it. Keeping him afloat between a past he dreaded, and a future he desired but not dared to hope for. It was a feeling as warm and empty as the dusty halls of the Star Destroyers on Jakku.

This time though, he was not afraid to let her in on the feeling. Slowly taking down the block a bit, he offered her all the gratefulness he felt at their newly formed peace, at her careful, but growing trust in him. A trickle of fondness at a memory he carefully kept beyond the block. She took it gladly, trading her relief for it. It was as odd as it was easy to share this with him. With _him_ of all.

He grew serious soon enough. ‘I will tell you, yes. As much as I know, at least. But not now. There will be time for this. First, we must get back.’

“Back where?”  
‘Back to my cockpit, then back to headquarters. I need to heal.’ His mockery was light this time, a friendly tease that felt strangely comfortable, like long worn-in routine.   
“You definitely do.” She still wondered about the destination of their journey, but decided not to voice it.  
He simply gave her a laconic smile at her comment, sensing the doubts forming at the back of her mind. Directing them on the practical matter at hand dispersed them momentarily: ‘You’ll need to get my lightsaber and mask before we leave.’  
“I’ll fetch that in a second”, she replied, not hiding her own smile this time, even if it was a bit insecure, and got on her feet. “Here, let me help you first.”

She was quickly at his side, pulling him back up with some help of the Force. In contrast to the lifeless weights she had struggled to levitate back on Ahch-To, the Force flowed surprisingly free around him. It was like following the movement of a tidal wave. Unstoppable, determined. Quite easy to follow once she submitted to it.

He had noticed. She sensed it as he pressed up close to her, and gave in to the direction of her movements freely. As if they were his own. His surprise mirrored hers, but he simply relaxed against her and let her guide him out of the falcon. At peace, despite his pain. For now at least.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (*LeChatelier principle – which is actually chemistry, and not astrophysics, but wtf.)
> 
>  
> 
> To be continued.


End file.
